Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture

Order, Strands and the Meeting of Times: The Full Treatment

The Craft Behind the Story (Second Edition), Reference — Chapter 8. Part II: The Joins.

This chapter is new in the second edition, so its Reference layer is this single file rather than a corrected original. It extends the reader’s version in Core, Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture, and can be read without it: the definitions it relies on are restated in section 1. Illustrative passages are quoted briefly for the purposes of criticism and study, and full citations appear in section 10. Where a work is read in translation, the translator is named. The analyses disclose the endings of the works they discuss.

Contents

1. Scope and working definitions
2. The theory at length: the two orders; Genette’s anachronies; primacy and recency; suspense, curiosity and surprise; unnatural times; the evidence
3. The extended catalogue of architectures: the five of the Core chapter; the reset, the retold and the single day; a summary table; four rulings
4. The extended catalogue of failure patterns
5. The diagnostic procedures, with the order chart and the strand table
6. Further analyses: Cloud Atlas, Hamnet, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Dunkirk
7. The household arrangement in full
8. The limits of the model
9. Glossary of the chapter’s terms
10. Sources

1. Scope and working definitions

Story order is the sequence in which events happen in the world of a book; text order is the sequence in which the book presents them. Any discrepancy between them is an anachrony. A book is non-linear when its anachronies form a pattern at the scale of the book, so that the reader learns to expect them, rather than a scatter of local departures. It is multi-timeline when the pattern is organised as two or more strands: lines of the telling, each set in one time and continuous within itself, which the book leaves and resumes. Each continuous run of a strand is an instalment; each passage between strands is a switch; the distance in story time between strands at a given point is their interval; the story time a strand covers per page is its rate; and the point where strands meet is a convergence, which may be of times (one strand catches up with another), by cause (an act in one produces the situation in another) or by identity (a person or object is found in both). An orientation marker is anything that tells the reader which time she is in.

The governing claim is that a book told out of chronological order earns the departure when the order does work that chronology could not: each strand runs on a question of its own, the reader always knows which time she is in and how far it stands from the others, and the meeting of the strands changes what at least one of them meant. The claim concerns use, not difficulty. A book may be hard to follow and justified, as Faulkner’s are, or easy to follow and unjustified, as a draft with dated chapters and no reason for them is.

The boundary that matters most in revision is between a strand and a run of cutaways. A cutaway, in Chapter 7, is a single departure into the past that ends where it began; it answers to the present it interrupts. A strand recurs, advances in its own time between instalments and runs on a question of its own. Material that recurs without a question of its own lies at the threshold between them (section 3.4).

The chapter leaves the single cutaway to Chapter 7, the withholding of truths for their own sake to Chapter 15, the prologue as a unit to Chapter 10, threads in one time to Chapter 14, the duties of a middle to Chapter 11, and the order of volumes in a series to Chapter 17, Series and Genre.

2. The theory at length

2.1 The two orders

The Russian Formalists made the distinction that every later account of narrative time uses. Viktor Shklovsky, in essays of the 1920s, treated the arrangement of a story’s events as one of the devices by which art makes the familiar strange, and Boris Tomashevsky’s “Thematics” (1925; translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 1965) defined the fabula as the events in their causal-temporal order and the syuzhet as the same events in the order and manner the work presents them. The distinction tells a writer what she controls when she rearranges: not what happened, but when the reader meets it, and so what the reader knows at each point. It also tells her what she cannot change by rearrangement. A book whose events lack causal pressure in sequence will lack it in any order, since order can redistribute suspense but not create stakes.

2.2 Genette’s anachronies

Gérard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1972; translated by Jane E. Lewin, 1980) gave the comparison its working vocabulary. An analepsis goes back to an event earlier than the present of the narrative; a prolepsis goes forward to a later one. Each has a reach, its distance in time from the present it leaves, and an extent, the story time it covers. An analepsis is external when its whole extent lies before the start of the main narrative, internal when it lies within it, and mixed when it begins before and runs into it. Genette also named achrony, an event whose position in story time cannot be fixed, and syllepsis, the grouping of events by some kinship other than time, of place or theme, which is the principle of the mosaic.

Genette’s notation numbers the positions of units in story order and writes them in text order. The household novel, charted in section 7, is 2–4[1]–3–4: the prologue (story position 2), the July present (4), within which Nadia’s memory of the pen (1) is an internal cutaway, Dov’s evening of 9 March (3), and July again. The formula shows at once that the book has one sizeable anachrony at its centre of gravity, the move to position 3 at about 78 per cent, and that its prologue is the first instalment of a strand whose second instalment is that chapter. A writer who charts a draft in this way usually finds either that the arrangement is simpler than she thought or that it has no pattern at all.

2.3 Primacy and recency

Menakhem Perry’s “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings” (Poetics Today, 1979) argued that readers form a frame from the first material they meet and interpret later material through it, the primacy effect, until accumulated evidence forces a change, after which the latest frame governs, the recency effect. Meir Sternberg’s Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978) made the parallel argument for exposition: the placement of antecedent facts decides which the reader takes as normal. For a non-linear book the consequence is direct. Every arrangement installs some frame first, and the frame governs the reading of everything until it is overturned. Opening on the end of a story, as an anchored order does, makes the reader read every scene as a step towards it; opening on a strand set in the past makes her read the present as its consequence. Neither is neutral, and the writer’s choice of first strand is a choice of frame.

2.4 Suspense, curiosity and surprise

William Brewer and Edward Lichtenstein’s structural-affect theory (“Stories Are to Entertain: A Structural-Affect Theory of Stories”, Journal of Pragmatics 6, 1982) derived three affects from the relation between event order and discourse order. Suspense follows when the text presents an initiating event and delays its outcome; curiosity when it omits a significant earlier event and the reader knows something is missing; surprise when it omits one without the reader knowing and discloses it later. Their readers judged texts more story-like when the order produced one of these structures and the outcome was resolved. The theory makes a braided book’s switch legible: it is a delay of outcome in one strand, which produces suspense only if the strand left behind holds an initiating event without its outcome. It also accounts for the anchored order, which converts the suspense of what will happen into the curiosity of how did it come to happen, and for the reverse order, which is curiosity at every step.

2.5 Unnatural times

Brian Richardson (“Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, 2002) and other writers on what they call unnatural narrative have described temporalities that no single story order can reconcile: times that loop, run backwards in causation as well as telling, contradict themselves, or move at different rates for different characters in one world. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), whose hero lives for more than three centuries and ages about twenty years, is a familiar case of the last. Most revision problems involve reconcilable times, and the chapter’s tools assume them; a book whose times contradict each other on purpose is judged by whether the contradiction is declared and used, which is test 1’s question in another form.

2.6 The evidence

The empirical work on time in reading comes from the study of situation models, the mental representations readers build of the world a text describes. Rolf Zwaan, Mark Langston and Arthur Graesser’s event-indexing model (Psychological Science, 1995) proposed that readers index events on five dimensions, time, space, causation, intentionality and protagonist, and update the model when any changes. Zwaan’s “Processing Narrative Time Shifts” (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1996) found that sentences beginning An hour later or A day later took longer to read than those beginning A moment later, and that events from before a larger shift were recognised more slowly afterwards, though the distance in words was the same: a shift in story time makes earlier material less accessible. Keisuke Ohtsuka and William Brewer (“Discourse Organization in the Comprehension of Temporal Order in Narrative Texts”, Discourse Processes 15, 1992) reported poorer comprehension of the order of events when texts departed from chronological order; the chapter relies on the published summary rather than the paper for this finding.

These studies use short texts, mostly invented, read once in a laboratory, and none measures a novel. They support one inference, that every switch of time imposes a cost the reader pays in updating, and they say nothing about the pleasures that justify the cost, which Brewer and Lichtenstein’s theory describes and which no study cited here measures at book length.

3. The extended catalogue of architectures

3.1 The five of the Core chapter

Core classifies non-linear books by what governs their order. The braid alternates strands, each chronological within itself; in a converging braid the interval shortens until the strands meet in time (Where the Crawdads Sing, 2018), and in a parallel braid it holds and the strands meet by cause or identity (The Forgotten Garden, 2008; Station Eleven, 2014). The anchored order shows or announces an event early and tells the book towards it (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1981, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1982). The reverse order tells events backwards (Pinter’s Betrayal, 1978; Amis’s Time’s Arrow, 1991). The mosaic orders by association (Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969; A Visit from the Goon Squad, 2010). The nested order opens times inside each other and closes them in reverse (Wuthering Heights, 1847; Cloud Atlas, 2004).

3.2 The reset

The reset tells one span of time more than once, each telling starting again from the same point and diverging. Ken Grimwood’s Replay (1986) returns its hero, who dies at forty-three, to his college years again each time he dies, so that the reader meets the same decades many times with variations, and the film Groundhog Day (1993), which Chapter 11 reads as a middle, repeats one day. The reset’s strands are versions, not times, and its orientation problem is to tell the reader which version she is in; the usual solution is a fixed point of restart that the reader learns to recognise, and a difference in the hero’s knowledge from one version to the next. Its question is what changes between versions and why, and it fails when the variations are arbitrary.

3.3 The retold

The retold order tells one event several times from several vantages, each a strand of one event. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) gives four incompatible accounts of a killing; the first season of The Affair, which Chapter 13 reads for its allocation, tells each episode twice. The retold order is a viewpoint arrangement as much as a temporal one, and Chapter 13’s epistemological domain, adopted by Chapter 15 at the scale of a book as the plural-vantage form of the declined reveal, is its usual purpose: to show that no account suffices.

3.4 The single day in several lives

A braid whose strands each cover one day, often in different years, is common enough to name. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) is one day in one year with many minds; Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998) takes three days, in 1923, 1949 and the end of the century, linked by Woolf’s novel. The form’s rates are equal by design, and it must supply its variation by the strands’ differing stakes and by a convergence of identity (in The Hours, Laura Brown is the mother of Clarissa’s friend Richard).

3.5 Summary table

The table summarises what each architecture does to the reader and what it risks.

The rows combine. Memento (2000) is a reverse order braided with a forward strand that converges with it in time; Cloud Atlas is a nested order whose strands meet by reading; the household novel is an anchored order whose anchor, the prologue, is also the first instalment of a two-instalment strand.

3.6 Four rulings

Four earlier chapters proposed categories and left this chapter to adopt or reject them at the scale of a book, because time at that scale is its material.

The structural domain (Chapter 7): rejected as a domain of the cutaway; kept as the threshold of a strand. Chapter 7 proposed that a cutaway serves a structural domain when its function is architectural, establishing, maintaining or completing a pattern in the book’s design (the braided timeline, the returning frame, the recurring approach), and adopted it for diagnosis on condition that the pattern be declared and the claim checked. It conceded that the domain might be texture or reader knowledge seen at book scale, and that it mixed what does this deliver here? with what does this do for the book? Its test cases were The Forgotten Garden and Where the Crawdads Sing. At the scale of a book, both cases are strands, not runs of cutaways: each instalment of their past strands advances a question of its own (who left the child on the wharf, and why; how Kya becomes the woman the town suspects), and neither is justified by architecture alone. What Chapter 7 named is therefore the threshold of a strand, the point at which recurring material from another time acquires a question of its own and passes from Chapter 7’s tests to this chapter’s. The mixing of questions that Chapter 7 conceded is resolved by the threshold: what does this deliver here? is asked of a cutaway, what does this do for the book? of a strand. The first objection is upheld in part, since material that recurs in a pattern without a question of its own is texture at book scale, and fails as the explaining strand (section 4.1). Chapter 7’s two conditions survive as test 2 and as the rule that a strand be declared early.

Temporal counterpoint (Chapter 14): adopted at the scale of a book, as a property of the arrangement. Chapter 14 proposed temporal counterpoint, a subplot on a different clock from the main plot’s, and adopted it on condition that a thread claiming it also show a chain, conceding that it might be a property of the telling, that it rarely appears without thematic counterpoint, and, as unanswered, that it gives every slow, inert thread a defence. This chapter accepts the first objection and turns it into the ruling: a difference of rate is made by the arrangement, and it works only where a crossing sets one strand’s time against another’s. That answers the third objection, because the claim is checked at the crossings, where it can be seen, rather than asserted of a thread; a slow strand that never meets a fast one where the difference shows has no counterpoint to claim. Dunkirk (2017) and Hamnet (2020) are the test cases (sections 6.2 and 6.4). The second objection stands: in both, the counterpoint carries the theme. For threads in one time, Chapter 14’s condition stands unchanged.

The temporal domain (Chapter 4): adopted at the scale of a book, as the domain of orientation. Chapter 4 proposed that a detail belongs to a temporal domain when its work is to establish duration, sequence, decay, repurposing, season or interruption, with carriers in aspect, wear, residue and maintenance; it adopted the domain for diagnosis, conceding the parsimony objection, and left its fate at larger scales to this chapter. In a multi-timeline book the same places and objects appear in several times, and temporal detail is the only material that tells a reader which time a passage is in without a heading. That answers, at this scale, the objection that time is a feature of details rather than a kind: a detail may be chosen for the time it places a passage in and for nothing else, and such details are what orientation is made of. Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017), which Chapter 4 used, is confirmed as the test case: its thirteen chapters, one a year, are oriented by the calendar of a village. The parsimony objection stands for the single detail, where Chapter 4 left it. The domain’s failure at this scale is the undated strand.

The bridging object (Chapter 5): adopted at the scale of a book, as a means of convergence by identity, with a condition. Chapter 5 proposed the bridging object, a physical thing on both sides of a gap whose presence anchors the new unit by identity rather than resemblance, and adopted it for revision, conceding as unanswered that identity and resemblance may not differ for the reader. Its test cases were Station Eleven’s paperweight and the household ledger. Both pass at book scale on one condition, which this chapter makes part of the definition: the object’s condition or custody must change between its appearances, so that the change measures the interval. Under that condition identity and resemblance do differ for the reader, because a resembling object carries no history and an identical one carries the time between. The paperweight’s changes of custody across twenty years and the ledger’s change of hand on 9 March each tell the reader how much time has passed and through whose hands. Without a change, the conceded objection stands, and the object is a match-cut.

4. The extended catalogue of failure patterns

4.1 The five patterns of the Core chapter

The arbitrary arrangement departs from story order for interest the departure does not produce; it fails test 1, and its exception is Catch-22 (1961), whose scatter is a recurring approach to Snowden’s death. The lost reader is a failure of orientation, test 3; its exception is The Sound and the Fury (1929), whose first section makes disorientation its narrator’s condition. The explaining strand recurs like a strand and works like a cutaway, accounting for the present without a question of its own; it fails tests 2 and 6, and its exception is Citizen Kane (1941), whose flashbacks borrow the frame’s question. The lockstep braid runs its strands at one rate, failing test 5; its exception is The Hours (1998), whose equal days are its argument. The convergence by coincidence joins strands by a link that changes nothing, failing test 7; its exception is Cloud Atlas (2004), whose birthmark is idle and whose real link is reading.

4.2 The premature convergence

Symptom. The second half of the book feels like an epilogue; readers say it lost its tension once the timelines met. Mechanism. A converging braid whose strands meet before the book has a question for the merged line. The meeting answers both strands’ questions at once, and nothing replaces them; it fails test 7 on the side of timing, and Chapter 15’s successor test. Remedy. Move the meeting later, or let it raise a question that only the merged line can answer, and make that the second half’s engine. Exception. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), whose diary strand meets the present at the start of Part Two, about halfway, and whose second half runs on the stronger question the meeting creates: what Amy will do next.

4.3 The frame left open

Symptom. Readers reach the end and ask what became of the people in the opening. Mechanism. A nested order whose outer frame is opened and never closed, so the inner time is never judged by the outer; it fails test 7, since one convergence is missing. Remedy. Close the frame, however briefly, or cut it, unless its openness is the point and the book shows that it is. Exception. Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), which opens with Douglas and his listeners round a fire and never goes back to them; the open frame leaves the governess’s account without the judgement a closing would supply, which is the book’s ambiguity.

4.4 The over-labelled book

Symptom. Readers report no confusion and little immersion; they read the headings more attentively than the prose. Mechanism. Orientation carried entirely by headings and time-stamps, so that the strands’ own material does no placing and the reader is told rather than shown which time she is in; it passes test 3 at the cost of the temporal domain’s work. Remedy. Remove the headings from one strand in a test copy and see whether its instalments still place themselves; supply the details that would let them, then keep only the headings that still earn their place. Exception. Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), which heads its sections with a date and the lovers’ ages, and succeeds because its hero’s condition puts him in two times at once, where no detail could place the reader as quickly (section 6.3).

4.5 The strand that outgrows the book

Symptom. Readers prefer the strand the writer meant as secondary, and the book’s ending, which resolves the other, disappoints them. Mechanism. A strand given a stronger question than the main line, so that the arrangement’s weight falls where the book’s resolution does not; it is the explaining strand’s opposite. Remedy. Either make the stronger strand the main line and resolve the book there, or weaken its question so that it serves the other. Exception. The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974), whose strand of the young Vito’s rise in the 1910s and 1920s many viewers prefer to Michael’s story in the 1950s; it succeeds because the film is built on the counterpoint, the father gaining a family as the son loses his, so neither strand is secondary.

5. The diagnostic procedures

The tests use two documents. The order chart numbers every unit of the book (chapter or scene) by its place in story order and lists the numbers in text order, with each unit’s position in the book as a percentage; Genette’s notation (section 2.2) is a compressed form of it. The strand table gives each strand a row and seven columns: its question, its span of story time, its page count, its rate (span divided by pages), its viewpoint, its orientation markers, and the point and kind of its meeting with the others. Draft both before revising.

Test 1, necessity. Retell the book in story order in a page. List what a reader of the arrangement knows, wants or fears at the quarter, the middle and three-quarters that a reader of the retelling would not. Fewer than two items in all is a failure; one item is a design to rebuild around.

Test 2, strand question. Write each strand’s question in a line. Read the other strands for its answer; a question answered elsewhere before the strand reaches it is no question. For a strand set in the past, check especially that the present does not show its outcome.

Test 3, orientation. Copy the first two sentences of every instalment onto one page and mark those that place the reader in time. Classify each marker as viewpoint, tense, detail, object or heading; a strand placed by headings alone is the undated strand.

Test 4, interval. Plot each strand’s story time against text position. Lines that converge show a clock; parallel lines need a reason, usually a meeting by cause or identity; lines the reader cannot plot, because the text never says how far apart the times are, are a failure unless the book’s design is achronic.

Test 5, rate. Read the rate column. Strands within a factor of two of each other run in lockstep unless a crossing shows a difference of another kind. For strands of different rate, find the crossing where the difference shows; if none exists, the counterpoint is claimed, not made.

Test 6, switch. For every switch, note the open question left behind and the first thing that happens in the instalment entered. An instalment whose first page could be cut without loss is an entry that does not pay.

Test 7, convergence. Name each meeting and its kind, then write what at least one strand means after it that it did not mean before. A blank is the convergence by coincidence; a meeting before the last third needs a successor question.

Test 8, withholding. List each fact the arrangement delays. For each, ask whether a character could have told it earlier and why she did not; apply Chapter 15’s test for a withholder.

6. Further analyses

6.1 Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell, 2004): a nested order joined by reading

Six stories, from a nineteenth-century Pacific journal (Adam Ewing’s) through letters of 1931 (Robert Frobisher’s), a thriller set in 1975 (Luisa Rey’s), a present-day comedy (Timothy Cavendish’s) and a twenty-second-century testimony (Sonmi-451’s), to an account of a far future after a collapse (Zachry’s), are told in nested order: the first five break off, the sixth is told whole at the centre, and the five resume in reverse, ending where the book began. Each later narrator encounters the earlier story as a text or a film: Frobisher finds half of Ewing’s journal, Luisa reads Frobisher’s letters, Cavendish is sent Luisa’s story as a manuscript, Sonmi watches a film of Cavendish’s, and Zachry’s people revere Sonmi.

The strand questions are each story’s own, and the nested order adds a second question to each, how its story will be read later, which the next story answers. The book’s rates differ by centuries, and the counterpoint shows at every break, where a story is cut off and becomes, in the next, a document someone finds incomplete. The convergence is by identity, of a kind the chapter’s condition anticipates: the text changes custody and condition between strands (half a journal, a manuscript, a film), and each change measures the interval. The comet-shaped birthmark several protagonists share is the idle link (section 4.1); the reading is the working one. The nested order’s containment does the book’s argument: each age is judged by the next, which reads it as a fragment, and the book closes on the earliest voice, Ewing’s, resolving to oppose the predation the later stories have shown.

6.2 Hamnet (Maggie O’Farrell, 2020): counterpoint of a day and fifteen years

The first part braids two strands. One covers a single day in 1596 in Stratford, when Judith, one of the twins, falls ill and her brother Hamnet runs from house to house looking for help; the other begins about fifteen years earlier, with the courtship of Agnes and a young Latin tutor whose name the novel never uses, and runs through their marriage, the children’s births and his departure for London. The second part follows the family after Hamnet’s death, to Agnes’s journey to London and a play that bears her son’s name.

The two strands of the first part run at rates differing by a factor of thousands, and the arrangement makes the difference felt. Each instalment of the long strand ends at a choice whose cost the short strand is paying: Agnes’s decision to stay in Stratford when her husband goes to London is read against a day on which the father is absent and the mother is away from the house. This is temporal counterpoint as section 3.6 rules it, a property of the arrangement checked at the crossings, and it carries the book’s theme, the price of the life the marriage chose, which the second objection to the domain predicts. The strands converge in time when the long strand reaches 1596 and the day’s end, which is Hamnet’s death, and the second part changes the arrangement to a single chronological line, which is itself a change of rate after the meeting.

6.3 The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger, 2003): orientation as structure

Henry DeTamble has a genetic condition that moves him involuntarily through time; Clare Abshire meets him first when she is six and he is thirty-six, visiting her childhood from his future, and he meets her first when he is twenty-eight and she is twenty, in a library in Chicago, when he has never seen her before. The novel alternates their first-person narratives, and each section is headed with a date and both of their ages.

The arrangement is a braid of two lives in one chronology, Clare’s, with Henry’s instalments scattered through his own. The orientation problem is the hardest in the chapter: the same man appears at different ages in one scene, and a reader must know which Henry she is meeting. The headings solve it, and they are the over-labelled book’s exception (section 4.4). The questions are distinct for each narrator, Clare’s how to live with a man who comes and goes, Henry’s whether he can change what he has already seen, and the convergence is the one the opening implies, the meeting in which both are their own age.

6.4 Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017): three rates in one rescue

The film braids three strands, titled at their first appearance: the mole, one week, following soldiers on the beach waiting for evacuation; the sea, one day, following a civilian boat, the Moonstone, crossing the Channel; the air, one hour, following Spitfire pilots covering the evacuation. They are intercut as though simultaneous, so that night falls in one strand while another is in daylight, and they cross at the rescues: a pilot shot down is picked up by the Moonstone, and men in the water are saved by the boat and covered by the pilot whose hour ends on the beach.

The arrangement is temporal counterpoint at its purest, since the three rates are the design and the crossings are where they show: an event first seen in the hour-long strand is seen again from the day-long one, later in the film and earlier in its own strand’s day, so the viewer feels the same moment as an hour’s urgency and as a day’s labour. The questions are the strands’ own, whether these men get home. Orientation is carried by the title cards and by each strand’s own material, the beach, the boat, the cockpit, the cheapest markers in film. The convergence changes little in what the strands meant and much in what they feel like, which is the exception to test 7: the film’s argument is that the rescue was made of different durations that met.

7. The household arrangement in full

7.1 The draft strand

The draft in Core’s “The Problem” braids six chapters in the father’s viewpoint through the first three-quarters of the book, each headed with a date. Charted, they fall at about 10, 22, 35, 48, 60 and 75 per cent: a scene of the second loss of the good pen, in February, with his line to Nadia; a day at the shop with a letter he does not open in front of anyone; the stock count and the till counted twice; a Sunday with Ma, who names his habit with the cuff; the prologue’s day retold at length; and the evening of 9 March up to the entry breaking off. The last would sit three per cent before Dov’s chapter of the same evening.

The draft passes test 3 and fails tests 2, 5, 7 and 8, as Core records. Section 2.4 shows why test 6 fails as well: every switch into the strand leaves the sisters’ July on an open question and enters a time whose outcome the reader knows, so the switch converts suspense into nothing. Two chapters also retell what the book already has, the prologue’s day and the pen conversation, the first by duplicating a unit and the second by moving Nadia’s memory, with its misreading, into the father’s mind, where it cannot be a misreading. And the strand grants a viewpoint the allocation of Chapter 13 does not include.

7.2 The order chart

Without the strand, the book’s story positions are: 1, the second loss of the pen, in the year of the father’s death; 2, the last ordinary day, early March, three days before he stopped answering the phone; 3, the evening of 9 March; 4, July. In Genette’s notation the text order is 2–4[1]–3–4. Position 1 is an internal cutaway within position 4, at about two-thirds, through Nadia’s memory; position 3 is a full chapter at about 78 per cent. The prologue and Dov’s chapter are the two instalments of a March strand.

7.3 The strand table

Measured across the gap between its instalments, the March strand covers a few days in about 4 per cent of the book and the July strand a few weeks in the rest, so the rates differ by a factor of about four, March the faster. The difference shows at one crossing, the ledger page on which eleven years of one hand stop and four months of another begin: the reader meets it in July at a quarter, and enters its first evening at 78 per cent.

7.4 The revision

Version B cuts the draft strand and heads Dov’s chapter 9 March, written as the date stands in the ledger. It is the only dated heading in the book, and it uses the bridging object as an orientation marker: the reader has seen the date on the page where the hand changes, at about 25 per cent, and the heading places her by recognition rather than by a calendar. The chapter’s text is unchanged, including the two sentences that Chapter 15 adds to it.

7.5 What the revision settles, and what it does not

The revision settles that the household novel is an anchored order with a two-instalment March strand, that the father has no strand of his own, and that the ledger is the object joining the times, under the condition of section 3.6, since it changes hands and hand between them. It does not settle the interval between the prologue’s day and 9 March, which the prologue measures from the day the father stopped answering the phone and the canon does not date; whether that day was the ninth is left to the author. It does not answer the early reader’s complaint that the father is a ghost, which the book’s subject defends and a reader may still reject. It assumes that no other chapter of the book carries a heading that would make a dated one unremarkable. And Nadia’s memory of the pen, the book’s one cutaway into a third time, must carry its marker, the second time he lost the pen, in its first sentence.

8. The limits of the model

The model assumes a reader who reads once, in order, and assembles a story order as she goes, and a book whose times can be reconciled into one chronology. It fits the braided commercial novel, the anchored mystery and most literary arrangements well, and fits less well the books that unsettle chronology on purpose, whose times loop or contradict each other (section 2.5), and the rereader, who holds the whole story order from the first page and reads an arrangement as a set of juxtapositions rather than a sequence of disclosures. It also treats a strand as defined by its time, when some strands are defined as much by a viewpoint or a document, as the retold order shows; the chapter’s boundary with Chapter 13 is drawn for convenience, not on principle. And the evidence in section 2.6 measures the costs of a change of time and not its pleasures, so the model’s claim that an arrangement must earn its costs rests on argument rather than measurement.

9. Glossary of the chapter’s terms

The definitions below are for the consolidated glossary.

Achrony. Genette’s term for an event whose position in story time cannot be fixed from the text.

Anachrony. Any discrepancy between story order and text order (Genette).

Analepsis. An anachrony that goes back to an event earlier than the present of the narrative; external, internal or mixed according to whether its extent lies before, within or across the start of the main narrative (Genette).

Anchored order. An architecture that shows or announces one event early and tells the book towards it.

Arbitrary arrangement. A failure pattern: a departure from story order for interest the departure does not produce.

Braid. An architecture that alternates two or more strands, each chronological within itself; converging when the interval shortens until the strands meet in time, parallel when it holds.

Bridging object. At the scale of a book, an object present in two strands whose changed condition or custody measures the interval between them; a means of convergence by identity (proposed in Chapter 5, adopted at this scale with that condition in Chapter 8).

Convergence. The point at which strands meet: of times, when one strand catches up with another; by cause, when an act in one produces the situation in another; by identity, when a person or object is found in both.

Convergence by coincidence. A failure pattern: strands joined by a link that carries no cause and changes no meaning.

Explaining strand. A failure pattern: material from another time that recurs like a strand but only accounts for the present, with no question of its own.

Extent. The story time an anachrony covers (Genette).

Instalment. One continuous run of a strand.

Interval. The distance in story time between two strands at a given point.

Lockstep braid. A failure pattern: strands at one rate, with crossings that produce no variation.

Lost reader. A failure pattern: instalments that do not tell the reader which time she is in.

Mosaic. An architecture whose units are ordered by association, theme or memory rather than by time.

Multi-timeline. Of a non-linear book whose anachronies are organised as two or more strands.

Nested order. An architecture that opens one time inside another and closes them in reverse.

Non-linear. Of a book whose anachronies form a pattern at the scale of the book.

Order chart. A list of a book’s units in text order, each numbered by its place in story order and placed by percentage.

Orientation marker. Anything that tells the reader which time she is in: viewpoint, tense, period or wear, an object, a heading or a time-stamp.

Over-labelled book. A failure pattern: orientation carried by headings alone, at the cost of the strands’ own placing.

Premature convergence. A failure pattern: strands that meet before the book has a question for the merged line.

Prolepsis. An anachrony that goes forward to a later event (Genette).

Rate. The story time a strand covers per page.

Reset. An architecture that tells one span of time more than once, each version starting again from the same point.

Retold order. An architecture that tells one event several times from several vantages.

Reverse order. An architecture that tells events backwards, unit by unit.

Story order and text order. The sequence of events in the world of a book, and the sequence in which the book presents them (the Formalists’ fabula and syuzhet).

Strand. A line of the telling set in one time, continuous within itself, that the book leaves and resumes, and that runs on a question of its own.

Strand table. A table giving each strand its question, span, page count, rate, viewpoint, markers and meeting.

Switch. A passage from one strand to another.

Syllepsis. Genette’s term for the grouping of events by a kinship other than time, of place or theme.

Temporal counterpoint. At the scale of a book, a difference of rate between strands that a crossing makes visible; a property of the arrangement (proposed in Chapter 14 for threads, adopted at this scale in Chapter 8).

Temporal domain. The work a detail does in establishing duration, sequence, decay, repurposing, season or interruption; at the scale of a book, the domain of orientation (proposed in Chapter 4, adopted at this scale in Chapter 8).

Threshold of a strand. The point at which recurring material from another time acquires a question of its own and becomes a strand; what Chapter 7’s proposed structural domain named (rejected as a domain of the cutaway in Chapter 8).

Undated strand. A strand whose instalments are placed in time by headings alone.

10. Sources

Brewer, William F., and Edward H. Lichtenstein, “Stories Are to Entertain: A Structural-Affect Theory of Stories”, Journal of Pragmatics 6 (1982), 473–486.

Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972), translated by Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

Ohtsuka, Keisuke, and William F. Brewer, “Discourse Organization in the Comprehension of Temporal Order in Narrative Texts”, Discourse Processes 15 (1992).

Perry, Menakhem, “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings”, Poetics Today 1 (1979).

Richardson, Brian, “Beyond Story and Discourse: Narrative Time in Postmodern and Nonmimetic Fiction”, in Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, edited by Brian Richardson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002).

Sternberg, Meir, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

Tomashevsky, Boris, “Thematics” (1925), in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965).

Zwaan, Rolf A., “Processing Narrative Time Shifts”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 22 (1996).

Zwaan, Rolf A., Mark C. Langston and Arthur C. Graesser, “The Construction of Situation Models in Narrative Comprehension: An Event-Indexing Model”, Psychological Science 6 (1995).

Works discussed: Amis, Martin, Time’s Arrow (1991); Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights (1847); Cunningham, Michael, The Hours (1998); Egan, Jennifer, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010); Faulkner, William, The Sound and the Fury (1929); Flynn, Gillian, Gone Girl (2012); Grimwood, Ken, Replay (1986); García Márquez, Gabriel, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), translated by Gregory Rabassa (1982); Heller, Joseph, Catch-22 (1961); Homer, Odyssey; James, Henry, The Turn of the Screw (1898); Mandel, Emily St. John, Station Eleven (2014); McGregor, Jon, Reservoir 13 (2017); Mitchell, David, Cloud Atlas (2004); Morton, Kate, The Forgotten Garden (2008); Niffenegger, Audrey, The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003); O’Farrell, Maggie, Hamnet (2020); Owens, Delia, Where the Crawdads Sing (2018); Pinter, Harold, Betrayal (1978); Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy (1759–67); Vonnegut, Kurt, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969); Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway (1925) and Orlando (1928). Films: Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941); Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017); The Godfather Part II (Francis Ford Coppola, 1974); Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993); Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000); Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1950). Television: The Affair (Showtime, season 1, 2014).

Second-edition lookups (2026-10-02), for the examples’ facts and sources: Wikipedia on The Time Traveler’s Wife, Hamnet, Dunkirk, Memento, Cloud Atlas, Where the Crawdads Sing, Station Eleven and Slaughterhouse-Five; SuperSummary on Hamnet (the two strands of Part One); the Fictionate essay on The Time Traveler’s Wife (dates and ages); Flavorwire on Faulkner’s coloured inks and the Folio Society edition of 2012; John Benjamins’s Bibliography of Pragmatics (Brewer and Lichtenstein); a summary of the structural-affect theory in an SBGames 2011 paper; PubMed Central (an eye-movement study’s account of Zwaan, 1996); the Living Handbook of Narratology, “Unnatural Narrative” (Richardson). The Ohtsuka and Brewer paper could not be fetched (the repository refused the request, and a second site was rate-limited); its finding is given from its title and general knowledge of the study, and should be checked.

Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture — Chapter 08, Reference: the full treatment. The reader’s version: Non-linear and Multi-timeline Architecture.