Much of the delight in reading “Roman Fever” stems from the surprise ending.  It is only when Mrs. Ansley turns towards Mrs. Slade to declare “I had Barbara” (“Roman Fever” 203) that the full scope of the history between these two women and their lovers is understood. This ending, then, comes as a surprise to the reader. As we read the story, our understanding of the central conflict, or agon, of the story, shifts. A surprise ending occurs when the reader’s expectation about what might happen at the end of the tale is violated, and instead another thing happens. Importantly, though, surprise is most effectively used when the ending that occurs, though unexpected, is well grounded in the rest of the text. Thus, on a second reading, one might easily notice clues as to the surprise ending that is coming. For example, upon a second reading, the two women’s characterizations of each other smack of ironic misconceptions, and the narrator’s description that “for a few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected how little they knew each other” (“Roman Fever” 205) foreshadows the ending scene. When the narrator suggests, “So these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her little telescope,” (“Roman Fever” 206) at the end of section one, despite the fact that the narrator is alerting us to the misinformation that these two ladies supply, we are habituated to Mrs. Slade’s point-of-view, and thus are more willing to accept her version of events as fact.

A related concept to the surprise ending is that of irony. Two types of irony traditionally occur in narrative fiction, situational irony and verbal irony. Situational irony might best be described using Seymour Chatman’s “funny coincidence” definition (Reading Narrative Fiction 186). Suppose that you just got your grandmother to send you the recipe for her famous Double-Chocolate Cherry Cake, a recipe that has been a closely guarded secret for years. The day after you get the recipe, though, you realize that you have developed an allergy to chocolate and so you will never be able to eat your favorite cake again. This is an example of situational irony. On the other hand, verbal irony occurs when a speaker conveys a message that is different, or even antithetical to, the literal meaning of the words he speaks. For example, if Jack arrives at Patsy’s birthday party without a present, Patsy might say to Jack, “How kind of you to bring such an impressive gift!” The irony that occurs in “Roman Fever” is an example of situational irony, in that Mrs. Slade has always felt that Mrs. Ansley “had nothing but that one letter [Delphin] didn’t write,” (“Roman Fever” 212) when in reality Mrs. Ansley had engaged in an intimate affair with Delphin and gave birth to his child.

In contrast to a surprise ending, consider the suspense that occurs in many psychological thrillers and detective stories. Suspense is present when the text indicates that several outcomes, usually including one that would be negative for a character that we strongly identify with, are possible. In Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Cask of Amontillado,” the narrator indicates at the beginning that he has planned retribution against Fortunato, and suspense builds as the narrative continues to hint at Montressor’s eventual deed.

Related Concepts: Implied Author, Implied Reader, Hermeneutic Code

The implied author, a term first coined by Wayne C. Booth, can be understood as the author’s second self, or the author’s persona that can be reconstructed from the text at hand. As narratology has developed as a field, there has been some debate over the existence or possibility of the implied author within a text. In 1997, Ansgar Nunning questioned the idea of the implied author, suggesting that Booth’s assertion that the implied author can be located in both the human author and the textual product is unsatisfactory. While Nunning gained support by several other narratology scholars, Rabinowitz and Phelan’s Living to Tell About Itdefinitively supports the concept of the implied author, highlighting the fact that for a reader to understand narrative irony within a given text, that reader must also understand the unstated principles of an implied author behind the text. This counter to Nunning’s argument successfully reinstated the concept of the implied author for many scholars, and Nunning himself even retracted his earlier statements.

The implied readeris also important to understanding a given text. The implied reader is the audience presupposed by a text, or, in other terms, the text’s ideal reader. Just as with the implied author, there can only be one implied reader for a text, even though there may be many actual readers of a given narrative. The implied reader for Wharton’s “Roman Fever” is one who considers the implications of female identity as strongly tied to her romantic partner’s, understands the theme of jealousy, retribution, and irony, and likely cheers the revelation of Mrs. Ansley’s triumph over the immature trickery Mrs. Slade engaged in years before. The implied reader, therefore, has certain gender and behavioral expectations that conform to norms to which this story prescribes. A reader who did not notice ironic discourse, of could not understand the social mores that called for Mrs. Ansley’s quick vacation and marriage after her tryst with Delphin, might not fit very well with the implied reader for this text.

Related Concepts:  Irony, Focalization, Narration, Authorial Audience

Wharton’s tale is particularly well suited to a discussion of the difference between discourse-space and story-space. Seymour Chatman defines discourse-space in verbal narrative as a “focus of spatial attention […] the framed area to which the implied audience’s is directed by the discourse” (Story and Discourse 102). Chatman further clarifies that “Verbal story-space then is what the reader is prompted to create in imagination” (Story and Discourse 104). Within this tale, the story-space is located in Rome and New York, as the action of the narrative (the fabula) occurs within both of these cities (as the two women carry out their love affairs, live their lives, and raise their families within the story). The discourse-space, meanwhile, is only the city of Rome, specifically the terrace overlooking the city where Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley sit to have their conversation, as this is where the two women are situated at the occasion of telling the story.

Mieke Bal, on the other hand, finds it useful to discuss space in terms of how it serves to set the mood or influence characterization within the fabula. For Bal, “the primary aspect of space is the way that characters bring their senses to bear on space” (Narratology 133). Especially useful in determining issues of space is an understanding of the character’s sense of sight, hearing, and touch within a defined setting. Consider how descriptions of sensorial negotiation of space flavor the first part of this story: “As they leaned there a girlish voice echoed up gaily from the stairs leading to the court below” (“Roman Fever” 203). Though the depiction of the echo reaching Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley’s ears, the reader understands that the two are seated at a higher vantage than the world below, and thereby might establish themselves as ones looking over or looking back on the happenings of life. This conception of this narrative space is reiterated throughout the text, as we hear how Mrs. Slade “pushed [two chairs] into the angle of the parapet, and settled herself into one, her gaze upon the Palatine” (“Roman Fever” 204) and then “explained [to the head-waiter] that she and her friend were old lovers of Rome, and would like to spend the end of the afternoon looking down on the view” (“Roman Fever” 204). Here again, these women are situated within this setting in positions of relative social status and power, overlooking a city that sprawls before them as they remain above the fray of the “common man” but still able to look at and enjoy that sort of scene.

Related Concepts: Focalization, Cinematic Narrative

Focalization is a more modern term for considering what many Western students understand as “point-of-view,” though it is a more abstract concept than point-of-view and thus more useful for unpacking complex texts. First developed by Gérard Genette, focalization might be considered the angle of vision through which the story is filtered within the text. It is important to distinguish this concept of focalization from narration. While a text may or may not have a narrator, every text, to some degree, includes a focalizer. One useful way to consider the difference between the two concepts is to ask “Who sees?,” where seeing is used in the broad sense of whose perspective we have access to, (the focalizer) vs. “Who speaks?” (the narrator). The concept of focalization has been further developed by Mieke Bal, Seymour Chatman (who puts forth the term “orientation”) and Rimmon-Kenan, among other narratologists. Rimmon-Kenan points to the semantic difficulties that lie in the use of the term focalization, as it still connotes visual/photographic themes, one of the major shortcomings of using the term point-of-view.

There are two basic types of focalization, external and internal. An external focalizer narrates the story from an outside perspective, usually in a neutral tone. An internal focalizer narrates from the perspective of one inside the events of the story, and usually acts as a character-focalizer. Just as there are two types of focalization, there are also two types of focalized, both external and internal. Externally focalized narratives detail only the literally visible phenomenon of the story-world, while internally focalized narratives can include these details as well as information about the thoughts, perceptions, or feelings of one or several characters. Applying these terms to “Roman Fever,” then, let’s unpack how this story is focalized. Most obviously, the focalized within this story is internal, as the focalizer allows access to the internal thoughts of Mrs. Slade, and, to a lesser degree, Mrs. Ansley. Yet interesting effects occur when we consider the voice that contributes to the focalization of this narrative.

Consider the following passage:

“No doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor Grace ever would. It was a big drop down from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the exceptional couple they were: but the difference after his death was irremediable.” (“Roman Fever” 205)

This passage stands as an example of Free Indirect Discourse (FID), a narrative tool used for either bonding or estranging effects, with estranging effects always used to encourage an ironic reading of the text at hand. In “Roman Fever” the narrator uses discourse to align the reader with Mrs. Slade’s position, and thus this effect is used for bonding within this tale. FID moves away from a diegetic narrative (telling), to a more mimetic (showing) level of narrative. [As an aside, the most diegetic narratives are strict summary, while the most mimetic narratives are strict dialogue.] Why is the voice FID?

Let’s look at several characteristics:
The personal pronouns used in narrating this story are “they,” “her,” and “she,” and thus the grammatical person used in this story is third person. The tense used in describing both the scenes that occur in the narrative past as well as the narrative now is past tense. Likewise, the diexisis (words used to show graphological relatedness) is in the style of outside narration, as when Mrs. Slade queries her friend “And the signature? […] Was that it? I’m right, am I? That was the letter that took you out that evening after dark?” (“Roman Fever” 209, italics added). The use of the word “that,” instead of “this” implies a distance from the matter at hand. These features are common to indirect discourse. Yet other aspects of the narrative voice within this piece are common to direct discourse. Consider the emotive words used when describing the scene, such as when the narrator tells of Mrs. Slade’s pondering of Mrs. Ansley and Delphin’s previous tryst: “All the years the woman had been living on that letter. How she must have loved him, to treasure the mere memory of its ashes!” (“Roman Fever” 210). Here we recognize that the voice is the narrator’s, yet it also rings of the surprise and incredulity of Mrs. Slade’s newly understood realization about the depth of the affair. Throughout the passage, there are also many instances in which the narrator’s voice seems to collide with Mrs. Slade’s, and the narrator begins to use vocabulary borrowed from the characters he is describing. In describing Mrs. Slade’s thoughts on Mrs. Ansley, the narrator suggests:

“Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told herself, or anyone else who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years ago, had been exquisitely lovely- no, you wouldn’t believe it, would you? …though, of course, still charming, distinguished…Well, as a girl she had been quite exquisite; for more beautiful than her daughter. Barbara […].” (“Roman Fever” 205)

The inclusion of such vocabulary choices as “exquisitely lovely” and “distinguished” mimic what the character herself might say, and the direct address “you wouldn’t believe it, would you?” implies that a more personal, direct discourse is occurring. Thus, with the mingling of these markers of direct and indirect language situations, we approach the form of Free Indirect Discourse. Free Indirect Discourse is often hard to mark, however, as it does not necessarily follow a specific set of rules or expectations. While some might suggest that the most obvious sign of FID is the narrator’s borrowing of language, sometimes it can be quite difficult to tell which words might reasonably be attributed to the narrator and which words should be attributed to the character. This difficulty is even greater when there is a small degree of separation between a narrator and the characters, as occurs when the story contains an (presumably) educated narrator and an equally educated protagonist.  FID can often be easier to recognize when there are noticeable differences in class, education, age, or other markers of how people might speak.

Related Concepts: Narrator, Roland Barthes, Direct Discourse, Indirect Discourse

In 1970, Roland Barthes conducted a “starred reading” of Balzac’s short story “Sarrasine,” in which he broke the master texts into different lexias that could then be investigated for different types of meanings, which correspond to five codes. In this famous essay “S/Z”, Barthes suggests that meaning is not stable, and that a single text can have up to five different voices speaking from it at the same time.

The proairetic code is also known as the code of actions. Within “Roman Fever,” a short description of the proairetic code could be formulated by a simple summary of the events in order of occurrence, rather than in the order of presentation. For example:

As teenagers, Alida and Grace vacation with their families in Rome during the winter. On vacation, Alida forges a love-letter to Grace from Alida’s fiancé, Delphin, asking to meet at the Coliseum in the evening. At the time, many people feared Roman fever, a form of pneumonia that could be caught from walking outdoors in the cold night air. Grace responds to the letter, meets with Delphin, and has a brief affair with him. Many years later, when both women are widowed, they again meet at the Forum, this time with their own teenage daughters. Upon this meeting Alida reveals her previous trickery, and, Alida, shocked by the deceit, leaves the meeting after revealing that her daughter, Barbara, is actually the love child of she and Delphin’s fated meeting. 

More importantly than simply summarizing the text, however, the proairetic code is useful for identifying repetition in actions, thoughts, or outcomes that occur in the text. Within “Roman Fever,” the theme of deceit and disguise is carried through each scene of the narrative, and suggests that these women have lived misguided lives based on various untruths. This same motif of repeated deceit speaks to the character traits that both women have of maintaining appearances at all costs, valuing themselves and others by the façade they put forth, and prizing politically correct arrangements over those that secure personal happiness. Of course, the theme of deceit and trickery is not specific to this tale alone, and indeed might be considered a literary archetype (or model) that has been written about many times. Consider how the theme of duplicity appears in such oft-told stories as “Snow White,” the Native American coyote trickster myths, and Aesop’s numerous fables. The application of even this simple code of actions thereby reveals much about the underlying structure of the story being told.

The hermeneutic code is the code of puzzles. This code pertains to the mysteries and gaps that the narrative introduces. Every narrative toes a fine line between providing enough mystery to keep the reader invested in the text while still allowing enough orienting information to help the reader understand the plot as it unfolds. Some of the unanswered questions that first appear in “Roman Fever” are centered on Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley. Why are they in Rome together? Why do the two women seem some competitive with one another? These questions are largely answered as the reader comes to the revelation at the end of the text. Consider, too, though, that the narrative alludes to these answers many times throughout the text, though these illusions are perhaps only caught upon a second or even third reading of the tale.

The referential code is the cultural code of a text. Texts written within a certain context will refer to and require understanding of a certain set of standards and beliefs. Literary theorists have, for years, been highlighting the necessity for having an appropriate historical perspective when reading certain texts. Some areas that one might address when attempting to unpack “Roman Fever” in terms of its referential code may concern societal standards expected of unmarried women of Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley’s generation. While modern standards would not usually predicate the “sending away” of an unmarried girl who became pregnant, this was common practice in the period of the story and thus would not have been considered out of the ordinary in retrospect. Likewise, the acceptance of folklore also implies a certain societal standard, as does the older women’s eventual dismissal of such superstitions as adults – while societal customs four years prior may have heavily supported the belief in wives’ tales such as those related to Roman Fever, the culture in which the elder women live in the narrative “now” likely no longer takes such myths as seriously. Another concept related to this code is that of the implied author, as many of the implicit feelings and considerations of this figure often arrive within a text as symbolic of the references of the implied author’s society. For example, in the case of this short story, the implied author is one concerned with women’s responsibility to uphold a face of social superiority even when experiencing defeat – thus the stoic nature of the two ladies during this troublesome conversation could be read differently by one who did not understand or recognize the cultural codes in place in this narrative time.

The connotative code, or the semic code of a text, is the area in which Barthes suggests that readers take notice of the major words and images used within a text, exploring their connections and connotations. For example, one of the most important phrases that appears in this short story is the title one, “Roman Fever.” While it may seem that this phrase has to be used to describe the ailment that the two women speak about, there are actually many other terms that Wharton might have chosen, such as night sickness or simply Roman pneumonia. “Roman” connotes a gladiatorial stance and air of antiquity, both appropriate terms to apply to the old rivalry between Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley. “Fever,” on the other hand, can denote a sickness but also connotes heat, passion, and fiery romance – all terms which might well describe these women in their younger days (and, perhaps, even in their older age).

Another area that is often turned to as of interest when considering the connotative code is the use of names of the main characters. While an entire essay could be written on the implications of Wharton’s choices of names for the characters in this story, let us just focus on Mrs. Ansley’s first name, “Grace.” This name connotes ease under stressful situations, a sense of decorum about life and how one ought to act in it, and spiritual salvation when a higher being intercedes on human beings’ behalf. This name, then, is particularly appropriate to the way that Mrs. Ansley conducts herself upon learning of the trick that was played on her long ago. It also might speak to a sense of “divine providence” in which, despite Mrs. Slade’s evil intentions, Mrs. Ansley is blessed with the daughter that she and Delphin created. Furthermore, one interesting approach to the connotative code is to explore the contradictions that it might suggest – the term grace may not be the first that we associate with a young girl who seeks a romantic rendezvous with her friend’s fiancé. This fact does not mean that the previous associations between Mrs. Ansley’s name and her character are invalid, but, rather, that they are complex and should be richly explored.

The symbolic code points to some of the inherent oppositions within the text, and asks readers to question these oppositions and how they contribute to the greater meaning of the narrative. In “Roman Fever,” one of the most obviously contradictory themes presented is that of appearances versus reality, or truth versus deceit. The climax of this plot occurs when the two women realize that what they believed to be the truth of what happened years ago was not in fact the case, and that they have been deceived for years by how things appeared to their limited perspectives as young adults. An analysis of the symbolic code offers a nice opportunity to investigate the larger meanings for reading and writing this text at hand – Wharton, writing at the beginning of the 20th century, was experiencing changing social mores about the role of women and frequently criticized pre-World War I upper-class society through her use of dramatic irony and humor. Her interest, then, in the seeming falsity of outward appearances could be read as a critical statement on the state of America at the turn of the century, and a warning to reevaluate priorities commonly held as paramount in some upper-class societies.

Related Concepts: Foreshadowing, Suspense, Surprise, Dramatic Irony

The events that occur in a narrative can be organized according to a logic of hierarchy, with major events ordered as more primary then minor events. Different theorists use different terms to differentiate between major and minor events. H. Porter Abbot calls the two types of events “constituent” and “supplementary” events, Roland Barthes distinguishes between “nuclei” (noyaux) and “catalyzers” (catalyses), and Seymour Chatman uses the terns “kernels” and “satellites.” Importantly, H. Porter Abbot reminds us that, though there is a tendency to order events in deference to level of importance, “constituent events are only necessarily more important than supplementary events insofar as we are concerned with the sequence of events that constitute the story itself.” (Cambridge Introduction to Narrative 23). Put simply, though, constituent events are those that are necessary to keep the story moving forward. A constituent event cannot be deleted from a narrative without altering the story itself. Supplementary events, however, can be deleted or added to the discourse level of a story without altering the main master-plot of the narrative.

In Wharton’s text, some constituent events are the women’s first trip to Rome, their return trips to Rome, the birth of Barbara, Mrs. Slade’s sending of the letter, and Delphin Slade’s rejoinder to Mrs. Ansley’s response to the first letter. These events are some of the instances that make up the basic plot structure of the story told in “Roman Fever.” Some supplementary events are also included in this text, and, while they add color and flavor to the narrative told, they do not necessarily need to be incorporated into every retelling of this “story.” One such supplementary event is when Mrs. Slade calls the waiter over to let him know that she and her companion would like to sit awhile and look out over Rome, and he graciously acknowledges her request. This scene, while helping the reader to understand Mrs. Slade’s character and place in society, could be deleted from the text without altering the basic fabula.

Related Concepts: Narrative, Fabula, Sjužet

Shelley Jackson was born in 1963 in the Philippines and later became a naturalized United States citizen. Jackson won an Electronic Literature Award in 2001 for her piece Patchwork Girl, which was one of the first hyperlinked fictions authored by a woman to achieve critical acclaim. Jackson writes hypertext, new media literature, and children’s literature, and is an accomplished illustrator. Another of Jackson's project's, Skin, is a text tattooed onto the bodies of volunteers and released only in that format.

My Body: A Wunderkammer is published online at http://www.altx.com/thebody/.  This work was first published in 1997 and is a semi-autobiographical piece that combines text, images, and hyperlinks to narrate several connected events in the life of the protagonist.

To visit Shelley Jackson’s website please click http://ineradicablestain.com.

(Biographical Information: Contemporary Authors Online, 2007. May 5, 2009)

The concept of time changes when applied to narrative fiction. In the real world, time corresponds to our abstract perception of the passage of moments, be they hours, decades, or eons. In narrative, though, time must generally be related to events or incidents. Furthermore, there is an important distinction between discourse-time and story-time. Discourse-time is the time of telling: the two hours that it takes to watch a movie or the thirty minutes that it takes to read the chapter of a novel. Story-time is the time taken up by the events of the narrative: the twenty-plus years that Rip Van Winkle sleeps or the one-hundred years of solitude about which García Márquez writes.

 Gérard Genette summarizes his analysis of the time in relation to narrative in his essay “Time and Narrative in A la recherche du temps perdu.” Specifically, Gerard covers the ways in which narratives provide information about the narrative moment in relation to the reading moment.

Narrative order is an important aspect of narrative fiction – this refers to the relative synchronism between the order in which events are narrated and the order in which they occur. Classical plots often unify the order of narration and the order of occurrence in normal sequence, while plots that are more modern tend towards more anachronous approaches to narrative. Analepse (flashback) occurs when the discourse breaks the flow of the story to return to an event that has happened previously. Much of Jackson’s tale is told in the analeptic form: we understand that an adult in narrating her relationship to her body and many of the scenes revealed are flashbacks to her as a child. For example, in the “Arms” lexia, the narrator describes how “At twelve I did more chin-ups than anyone else in my class, and the boys came running jubilantly across the playground and caught me up like a sports hero.” We know, though, that the narrator is no longer twelve and has now reached adulthood, as later in this lexia she states, “Weirdly, popular opinion has voted for my kind of body. Women train to look like me, and now and then come up to ask for tips. What do you do to look this way, they ask. … They call me lucky. It is a quiet revenge for years of incredulous shrieks in bathrooms and dressing rooms.”

Narrative duration addresses the time it takes to read or view a narrative in comparison with the time it takes the narrative events themselves to progress. There are five basic possibilities of narrative duration: summary (discourse time is shorter than story time), ellipsis (discourse time is shorter than story time because there is no discourse time), scene (discourse time and story time are equal, usually included dialogue and short physical action), stretch (discourse time is longer than story time), and pause (discourse time is longer than story time because there is no story time). Jackson’s story makes use of summary to relay these narrative events, because it takes the reader much less time to read about the span of the protagonist’s experiences with her body than it does for the protagonist to have these experiences.

Narrative frequency refers to the representation of an event within a narrative. There are four possibilities of narrative frequency: singularity (event happens once and is describe once), multiple-singularity (there are several representations of one event), repetitive: (there are several discoursive representations of the same event), and iterative (there is a single discoursive representation of several story moments). In Jackson’s lexia “Fingernails” there are a few examples of different types of narrative frequency. When Jackson writes “when I was five or six, everyone in my class were given a daily piece of fruit at school and ate it in unison,” she is narrating the story using the iterative principle – every day the students were given a piece of fruit, though Jackson tells us about it only once. When Jackson writes, however, “when I was five, I slit open the fourth finger on my right hand with a razor blade my babysitter, Miss Mudd, had left lying around,” she is writing singularly about this event – she once split her finger and she tells us about it only once.

Related Concepts: Story-Space

What is narrative? Gerald Prince defines narrative in his Dictionary of Narratology as “the representation … of one or more real or fictive events communicated by one, two, or several … narrators to one, two, or several … narratees” (58). Whew. That’s quite a mouthful. Other narratologists define narrative differently, however, and the debate rages on. Michael Toolan defines narrative as “a perceived sequence of non-randomly connected events, typically involving, as the experiencing agonist, humans or quasi-humans, or other sentient beings, from whose experience we humans can ‘learn’ (Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction 8). Seymour Chatman emphasizes the structured nature of narrative, while for E.M. Forester, narrative is a series of events linked in a causal way.

What, then, is Jackson’s “My Body: A Wunderkammer”? Reading the lexias, one could define this text as a series of related psychological narratives – as we read each lexia we learn more about the protagonist’s feelings towards her own body and the incidents or moments that sparked these feelings. Others might define this narrative as a more postmodern work – as the hyperlinked form, graphically enhanced presentation, and fragmented nature of the story all challenge literary preconceptions about “academic” literature. Other postmodern texts to consider might be Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler or Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch – novels that certainly provide telling of related events, though these events may be frequently interrupted and often do not conform to traditional narrative strategies found in more classical literature. As Seymour Chatman writes, postmodern plots “deliberately question the unwritten law of ‘causation.’ A traditional plot, remember, poses an initial situation that allows various events, but that gives rise to only a single one. … In one kind of postmodern fiction, however, a single situation might lead not to a single event but to two or more, and these might be mutually contradictory” (Reading Narrative Fiction 305). In Jackson’s text, there is no clearly “beginning” event, and the resulting impact is not definitively charted through the traditional plot structure.

Related Terms: Narrator, Narratee, Causality, Narration, Plot

As we work to interpret narrative, we must recognize the presence and importance of narrative gaps.Virtually every narrative has gaps throughout the text, and the reader can usually supply the information to fill these gaps quite skillfully. As an example, let’s take an excerpt from “My Body: A Wunderkammer.”

Once I asked for a consolatory treat after a trip to the dentist, and got a strawberry milkshake. I stabbed myself in the cheek with my straw several times until, with the help of the car mirror, I managed to guide the straw into my mouth. A little later, I felt a funny tickle at my collar, and looked in the mirror. A big dribble of pink had flowed all the way down my numb chin and was running down my neck. My lips, I figured out, only worked because they were conscious. (“Lips”)

The gaps in this passage are many. Whom does the narrator ask for a treat? Why does she stab herself in the cheek? What does a “funny tickle” feel like? What is the pink substance suddenly flowing down the narrator’s face?

All of these questions, however, are answered relatively easily in the context of the larger passage. Reading this lexia, we understand that the narrator is describing a time when she was a child, and asked her parents for a snack after having visited the dentist. The narrator seems to have no control over her mouth because of the Novocain the dentist administered, and the pink substance running down the narrator’s neck is strawberry milkshake.There is, however, the possibility for interpretative disagreement whenever there is a gap in the story. For example, someone might suggest that the pink substance dribbling down her face is in fact blood, and not her strawberry milkshake. In order to support my interpretation of this narrative gap, however, I would point to other details in the text: the child had just been to the dentist and was likely medicated, a strawberry milkshake would be pink, but blood would usually be red, and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of distress over this leaking liquid like there might be in the presence of blood.

While the above example might seem somewhat simplistic, consider some of the larger gaps in the text. Why does the child go to the dentist at all? For concern of hygiene, appearances, or both? What sort of society rewards a child with dentine- rotting treats after having already having to fix related damages to the teeth? Does the protagonist’s gender predispose her to fixating on her lips after visiting the dentist, rather than some other, less easily sexualized part of her mouth, such as her swollen gums? These sorts of gaps are perhaps less easily answered but can provide just as much interpretive fodder for literary theorists.

Related Terms: Suspense, Causality

Characterization is another key concept to consider when performing a narratological analysis of a text. Characterization is the ways that authors and narrators establish the basic traits and qualities of the existents within a story. Most characterizations takes a “bottom-up” approach, in which the reader notices a character’s particular actions or habits and combines these details to form a succinct idea of this character’s role in the text. Reading a text and noticing that one character wakes early every morning to run, has athletic jerseys lining his walls, and pays extra attention to the foods that he eats would probably lead the reader to conclude that we might characterize this person as “athletic.”

Some characterization occurs with a “top-down” approach, including Greimas’ actant model. This approach shares characteristics with Propp’s morphology of folktales, in which he asserts that the structure of every fairy or folktale conforms to thirty-one outlined functions. In the actant model, events are subordinated to character, and there are six "types" into which characters can fit. These six roles make up three related pairs: the giver and receiver, the subject and object, and the helper and opponent.

For practice, let’s look at a passage from the “Feet” lexia of “My Body: A Wunderkammer”

One summer I got swim goggles for the first time and became a lurker under surfaces, a spy in the underwaterworld. My eyes never tired of looking into that luminous space into which objects were abruptly born from above, sometimes only piecemeal: a leg punched in up to the knee seemed amputated, sutured to the elastic blanket of the undersurface, which was an oily, undulating sheet, a pewter-greasy blue. … I knew I could be seen from above, a sketchy figure pulled apart by light, but I felt invisible. I waited for the jumpers and divers, hurled into being in a bag (like a kitten) of air and a sudden architectural column of bubbles. But what I liked most was the feet: all those problematic people, so firmly planted on slavish, characterless feet - like slabs of clay - were suddenly afloat like angels. Their feet swelled and softened. Their feet looked like fruit, like fleshy tropical flowers. They became expressive and gentle, even beatific - they kicked softly at nothing, sought the bottom, and no sooner found it than dabbed at it coquettishly and rebounded away: relieved feet, lucky, suspended as in amber, beautiful and whole and to be considered for their own merits as forms. (“Feet”)

Even though this is a brief passage and not entirely analogous to a fairy tale, we can still apply Greimas’ model to it. I might read this passage in the following manner: The narrator is the subject, who desires the object of viewing people from a different perspective than their usual demeanor allows (note that the object can sometimes be a state of being). The giver of this text could be the goggles that allow a seemingly magical view of people, with the receiver again being the narrator of the tale (note that sometimes a single existent can fulfill multiple dimensions within this model).  The helper might be the relative transparency of the water, which allows some sight through its substance. The opponent, however, could also be considered the pool water, which is too murky to allow a clear view of these unguarded people.

One of the most interesting things that this actant model can do is provide a formula for dissecting a text from different points-of-view, and noticing how well different types of texts apply to certain schemas and archetypes. While it might not always feel completely germane to apply a model like this to works that do not fit into a predetermined pattern, there is still viable information that can be gathered from these attempts. For example, in the above analysis I find myself further thinking on the paradoxical relationship that the water holds for the protagonist’s efforts, and extending this analysis to other lexias of the text. While many might dismiss these structured sorts of models for analysis of complex literary works, they can actually help to understand texts whose conflicts are more demanding than those of fairy or folktales.

Related Terms: Vladimir Propp, Morphology, Structuralist Models of Narratology, Semantic Square

The premise of this website is to explain how narratological principles can be used to explore narrative works of literature, primarily fictional works. Why, then, do I use Jackson’s semi-autobiographical in this forum? I think that it is important to consider different genres as appropriate to this sort of rigorous analysis. Even when we tell the stories of our own lives, we are frequently performing a narrative, invoking concepts such as characterization, plot, causality, and temporality to have our narrative make sense and be interesting to other people. While the majority of narratological scholarship has been focused on literary fiction, these same principles can be applied with great success to forms other than those that have been canonically studied. After all, most fiction is autobiographical to some degree, and, in the same vein, more autobiographies or biographies frequently contain information that many would claim to be false or fictional.

A related study is Labov’s Outline of Natural Narrative. In 1967, William Labov and Joshua Waletzky published their study “Narrative Analysis: oral versions of personal experiences.” In this and subsequent studies, Labov outlined the general trajectory that people tend to use when presenting an oral narrative: abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, result or revolution, and coda. Even though this model is intended for use with oral narratives, it can still be very illuminating when applied to print and new media narratives. Consider Jackson’s lexia “teeth.” In the first sentence, the narrator provides an abstract, in which she tells us what this story will be about: “I am always teething.” The narrator orients us in the next sentence, telling us that even now she is experiencing discomfort in her gums because they are so sensitive. Then the narrator reveals the complicating action, in which she purposefully irritates her gums in order to cause pain. The narrator then evaluates this action with the assertion that she knows she will later regret her decision to irritate her gums. The final result of this narrative is that the fibers in the gums stretch and tear. Finally, the coda is established when the narrator states, “Later, when the riot is over, I feel both amused and ashamed, my gums swollen into caricatures, so sore I can hardly chew.” With this statement, we know that this aspect of the narrative is over and the narrator will move on to another topic or story.

One of the very first issues the strikes to the heart of this text is that of closure. How is it ever achieved? Is it? H. Porter Abbott writes, “closure is […] best understood as something we look for in narrative, a desire that authors understand and often expend considerable art to satisfy or frustrate” (57). Many readers might assume that Joyce either skipped this lesson in writing texts, or, perhaps, went to such great lengths to frustrate this desire for closure that his goal was certainly achieved to the nth level. Joyce’s Afternoon opens with a question for the reader: “Do you want to hear about it?” (“begin”). If you click Y (es), or hit the return key, the next lexia reveals, “I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning” (“I want to say”). This question and declarative statement, and the mysteries they entail, linger throughout the text. Abbot suggests:

“If the object is to satisfy this desire [for closure] – which is often the case – it can’t be satisfied too quickly, because we seem to enjoy being in this state of imbalance or tension that precedes closure. In fact, narrative is marked almost everywhere by its lack of closure. Commonly called suspense, this lack is one of the two things that above everything else give narrative its life. The other thing is surprise.” (99)

This lack of closure certainly exists in “Afternoon” – to a point. The most pertinent question surrounding the text – that of the fate of Lisa and Andrew is hinted at throughout the text, though never expressly answered. Most readers, as they get to the “end” of their readings, assume that it was Peter’s family that was in the accident – though there is really very little concrete evidence of this fact. The reader must arrive at this supposition only through the piecing together of seemingly related facts – Peter cannot get into contact with either his wife or his child, Peter finds a crumpled school paper of Andrew’s at the scene of the accident and subsequently bursts into tears, Peter asserts his certainty at having seen the two of them earlier this morning in Lisa’s Buick, others confirm the sighting, as well (“What gave me such a start was this nasty fender bender we had right along the lane leading up here…One of the office girls thought sure your – thought sure Lisa’d been caught up in it”) (“what I see”)  – it is through the assemblage of this pastiche of information that the reader can come to a somewhat reasonable consensus of what actually happened to Peter’s family.

Yet, the fact that the reader comes to a reasonable consensus does not mean that the text itself offers a viable conclusion. This, it seems, is the crux of the matter. While the reader may come to a satisfactory conclusion as to what happened to Peter’s family in one reading, a second reading may call into questions that conclusion, or, indeed, even contradict that ending altogether.  J. Yellowlees writes “where print readers encounter texts already supplied with closure and endings, readers of interactive fiction generally must supply their own sense of an ending” (164).  It is up to the reader, then, to decide when he or she has gathered enough information, has truly come to the “end” of the text, and can walk away from the computer screen having experienced some sense of cathartic closure via the art that they have just enjoyed. Interestingly, however, there is a default “end” to each reading – for any reading that a person undertakes, should he devote enough time and energy to the piece, he will come to a point where there are no more default links that one can follow – the computer beeps at the user who tries to click ahead -to signal some sort of binary error, that the message does not compute, simply put, that he or she has reached “the end.” Does this not stand as significant evidence of being able to put the piece away? In one lexia, Joyce writes, “Closure is, as in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends. Even so, there are likely more opportunities than you think there are at first. A word which doesn’t yield the first time you read a section may take you elsewhere is you choose it when you encounter the section again, and sometimes what seems like a loop, like memory, heads off again in another direction. There is no simple way to say this. (“Closure”).As this quote suggests, upon these points of termination the experience of reading the text does indeed cease. But how does this manual “end” qualify in terms of closure? Does it?

Seymour Chatman, discussing traditional print narratives, points to the difference between “open” and “closed” plots:

“[Closed] short stories have traditional closure, that is, they follow a familiar pattern of beginning, middle, and end. […] Many short stories, especially modern ones, do not contain suspense, surprise, or even profound changes in an ongoing state of affairs. They prefer to offer a slice of life, leaving us in the air, without a definitive conclusion, without a clearly finalizing event such as a wedding or a death.” (Reading Narrative Fiction 21)

Open texts, those that deny the reader a sense of resolution to the narrative task abound – consider even such classics as Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado.” In fact, nearly every text must incorporate some sense of openness into the narrative to maintain some level of real-life credence – rarely is every detail of every moment tied up at the end of the day, or at the end of a book, in such a neat package that we might concisely speak of the “end” of all events. A reading of Afternoon seems to reside somewhere in the middle of these two extremes – the plot is not entirely closed, as there is no singular ending that is reached upon every reading, and thus this is no finite conclusion to the story being told. Yet the plot is also not entirely open – there is a large degree of suspense and the reader can sense the changes occurring in the ongoing state of affairs. There are several points that suggest an interpretative reading could bring closure, if not to the question of the accident, then to other, smaller questions stemming from Peter’s activities of the day. It seems, then, that Afternoon is an amalgam of the two types of plots. It is open, in that a large part of the focus in on Peter’s development as he moves through this day. Yet the plot also hints at wanting to be closed, because, while much of the focus within the text is on how Peter reacts to certain events that occur on this day, it is made clear, early in the narrative (should you decide to “hear” it, to answer “Y (es)” to that first question), that this is no ordinary day at all. It seems that Afternoon, along with other electronic texts, offers options impossible with other means of telling stories. Do you want to reach an ending, any ending? Then keep clicking through, wait for your choices to disappear, and then walk away from the screen. But, if you want to reconsider that reading, and the subsequent ending that came with it, try again, a second or even third time, to read the text, making different choices and connections, and see how those details change your perspective of what happens at the end and what sort of “closure” might be possible.

Related Concepts: Resolution, Plot, Narrative, Suspense

In his book Cybertext, E. J. Aarseth outlines the different types of representation that might occur within a given text. Moving from Gerard Genette’s principle that narrative contains two types of representation, description and narration, Aarseth works to amend this principle in terms of interactive texts: “A hypertext such as Afternoon has […] three [types of representation]: description (“Her face was a mirror”), narration (“I call Lolly”), and ergodics (the reader’s choices)” (95).  In terms of narratological principles, description always falls beneath narration in terms of level of importance and immediacy within the text. Yet where does ergodics fall? Aarseth asserts an importance to this type of narration, stating “to make sense of the text, the reader must produce a narrative version of it, but the ergodic experience marks this version with the reader’s signature, the proof that Afternoon does not contain a narrative of its own” (95). I hesitate to suggest as much as Aarseth does, as I feel that Afternoon does include its own narrative due to the fact that it is a highly organized, highly regimented form of fiction that allows for the revelation of certain details only after certain others. This implies that there is a link between the information revealed and the time at which it is revealed to the reader, and, thus, that there is the suggestion of causality inherent to the text. Yet despite the breadth of Aarseth’s statement, he does well to suggest the relative importance ergodics play within the level of representation. If “showing” always trumps “telling”, it seems that “choosing” must be at least as important in terms of reader’s experience of the text at hand. What we know and what we choose to dismiss comes into play in any given text, yet, in electronic texts that present alternative versions of the same event, the act of knowing and choosing takes on even more significance as the reader moves to the end of their time with the tale.

Related Concepts: Surprise, Suspense, Hermeneutic Codes

Introducing the reader to the primary question that drives this text – are Lisa and Andrew dead? – introduces the element of suspense to the narrative. In S/Z, Roland Barthes utilizes a system of coding to break down a single text into multiple lexias that can be read in terms of multiple meanings. Of these five codes, the proairetic and hermeneutic seem especially applicable to the initial quandary that Peter presents, as well as to the notion of closure within this text. The proairetic code refers back to “the major structuring principle that builds interest or suspense on the part of a reader or viewer” (“Introduction to Roland Barthes”). Thus, the action of the plot that prompts us to want to read forward is included within a proairetic reading - when we learn that Peter has seen an accident, we wonder what will come of it. Learning about an event is the first step in desiring closure to that event. When Peter describes the antagonistic relationship between himself and Wert, we register this exchange as particularly important and wait to see what answers it might call for as the text progresses: “He asks slowly, savoring the question, dragging it out devilishly, meeting my eyes. <How… would you feel if I slept with your ex-wife?> It is foolish. She detests young men” (“asks”). This dialogue is loaded, every question and response seems significantly meaningful, and thus the reader tunes in to this action and wonders what the next turn of events between Wert and Peter might be. Thus, we see that reading this text does conform to some simple expectations of reading narrative plot, and, in using elements relative to the proairetic code, Joyce helps to orient readers within a familiar reading strategy.

Yet perhaps even more overtly linked to the issue of closure is a reading of the text based off of Barthes’ hermeneutic code, which “refers to any element in a story that is not explained, and, therefore, exists as an enigma for the reader, raising questions that demand explication” (“Introduction to Roland Barthes”). In the proairetic code, when we read of the beginning of a series of actions, we expect to read through to the end or resolution of that action. When Wert asks Peter one of his many inappropriate questions, we expect to hear a response. But in the hermeneutic code, the pleasure derides from the tension between knowing a question and not knowing the answer. The greatest mystery of this text is if Andy and Lisa were in the accident that Peter saw that morning. Like a good detective novel, Afternoon plays off of the reader’s identification with this question, many times offering the reader a narrative breadcrumb in one lexia and then undermining it in the next sentence. Take, for example, Peter’s rationalization of his asking Desmond if Lisa took her purse with her this morning: “Even as I ask it, I realize the question is mad, since they’d look up the registration on the car if she weren’t able to respond to them.” Here, Joyce teases the reader with a bit of sighed relief – Peter has not yet been notified, so it must not have been his family in the car. Then, however, in the very next sentence, Peter narrates, “Then just as quickly I realize that they wouldn’t necessarily call me, since the car is registered to her in the newly edited name which removes me from her utterly, except in the flesh of Andy” (“2”).  This caveat to Peter’s previous statement only serves to heighten the effect that this mystery holds for the reader, and helps to keep the reader invested in the text.

Related Concepts: Barthesian Analysis, Plot

J. Yellowlees Douglas, in her piece “How Do I Stop This Thing?” engages in four very detailed close readings of “Afternoon” – using a different reading strategy for each session with the work. For Douglas, a sense of closure is only reached upon deep inspection of the text at hand. Douglas writes, “My arrival at a sense of an ending for Afternoon is thus tied equally to reading strategies translated directly from reading print narrative and to strategies which embrace the text as an interactive narrative existing in virtual, three-dimensional space” (172). Certainly, borrowing old reading traditions and mixing them with new networking habits well serves the reader of electronic fiction. I think, also, that Douglas’ multiple readings of the texts and subsequent feeling of satisfaction stem in large part from the phenomenon of causality that occurs when we read any narrative text. As ideal readers, we want to be able to connect events in some way, make a narrative space in which x leads to z, and ascertain certain facts as congruent or integral to the progress of the story. Douglass achieves “closure” in her reading in large part because she determines causality – in short, Douglas figures out, or, at least, thinks that she figures out why Peter is so neurotic and what makes the vehicle crash. Douglas writes, “my sense of an ending here is informed […] by my awareness of the relative centrality of “I call” and relative inaccessibility of “white afternoon” (172). Through her readings Douglas has traced the paths that the hyperlinks takes, and determines that “I call” – in which Peter makes a call to his therapist Lolly – is the one lexia with the most links stemming out from it and also the one that seems to lead to the “white afternoon” – which Douglas reads as the endpoint of the narrative.

Douglas believes in the validity of her reading because of the logic and structure inherent to literary works. Chatman comments on this tendency, alerting us to the fact that even when no actual link between two events exists, our habit is to invent a connection and assign causality nonetheless: “the interesting thing is that our minds inveterately seek structure, and they will provide it if necessary. Unless otherwise instructed, readers will tend to assume that even ‘The king died and the queen died’ presents a causal link, that the king’s death has something to do with the queen’s” (42). Douglas, too, has made these causal connections, and, upon realizing that “I call” has the most outgoing links from it, and is one of the few gate-opening lexias, which readers must visit in order to proceed on to select further lexias, she decides to assign a primacy to this particular segment of text.

This is not to fault Douglas’ reading. In fact, I have found her to be one of the most attentive and convincing scholars to attack this issue of closure in hyperlinked narrative. Consider, though, the commentary that another lexia makes on this act of making final connections. “I’m sorry […] I am sorry but I’ll have to end this now. I do know what you feel.  You make some choices, you begin to see a pattern emerging, you want to give yourself to believing despite the machine. You think you’ve found something. […] That’s why I’m sorry I have to end it for you so soon” (“calm”). Here, the narrator’s perspective seems to shift from first-person Peter’s point of view to that of the author’s point of view – calling into question the links that we might have made, the ease with which we assign importance to one aspect of the text over another. Upon my first reading, it was this lexia that signaled the “end” to me – this was the place where the narrative cycle started again, and the next screen returned to that same sentiment “I want to say I may have seen my son die this morning” (“I want to say”). Upon trying to recreate that moment a day later, though, the task becomes impossible. No longer do the same yield words take me to the same lexias. My orientation is thrown off, and I, despite my best intentions, begin to read another fabula – I come across new beginnings, middles, and ends to this tale. It is not just that the same information is presented to me in a new or unusual order; Joyce’s Afternoon allows the content of the story to shift upon different telling. If, in my second reading, I never come across the discussion between Wert and Peter, that signals to me a new fabula, not just a new sjužet. This statement will likely cause some critics to murmur dissent, but, to them I ask – at what point does the archetypal “hero rescues princess” tale no longer resemble this master-plot at all? Once the princess becomes a house about to be demolished? Once the princess jumps out her own window to kill herself? The concept of variations on a plot is certainly debatable, but, for me, a reading that introduces completely new material, perhaps not even referencing some of the more salient features of another’s understanding of Afternoon, signifies the possibility for a multitude of stories to be present.

Related Concepts: Closure, Narrative

Let’s consider, though, the possibility of the “story” of this work being translated into different media genres. In 253: The Print Remix, Geoff Ryman adapts his internet-based work, 253: a novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash into a codex-based piece. This adaptation works on the level of plot, as the reader can simply follow along the cars of passengers in either text, or, though the use of either hyperlinks or the cross-referenced index in the back, can view the connections between passengers. It is arguable, though, if Ryman’s print version of the work holds the same associative immediacy as the online version, and my experience of this piece has been a feeling of dissatisfaction at simply trudging along the subway line as the narrative describes the same three features of each of the passengers. Yet how would Afternoon fare should it be remade into a new media form? I think that in order to answer this question, we have to first consider the traditional and non-traditional literary devices that Joyce uses.
This work makes use of various allusions to outside texts, pointedly referencing the allusions that occur even without the help of a hyperlinked structure. In the [Die] lexia, Peter narrates:

“I felt certain it was them, I recognized her car from that distance, not more than a hundred yards off along the road to the left where she would turn if she were taking him to the Country Day School. Two men stood near the rear of the grey buick and a woman in a white dress sprawled on the wide lawn before them, two other men crouching near her. Another, smaller body beyond. In the distance, coming toward them and the road along which I passed, there were the insistent blue lights of a sheriff’s cruiser and a glimpse of what I thought to be the synchronized red lights of the emergency wagon. It was like something from a film: Blowup or the Red Desert.”

Blowup, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, is a famous art-film that questions perception, representation, and the validity of observation as the viewer watches professional photographer Thomas navigate the possibility of being an inadvertent witness to a murder. The reference to this film, which itself is based off of a Cortazar story, is one of the many complex intertextual relationships which allude to other texts. In another delightful example, the lexia “Hop Scotch” includes the following quotation: “In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56…The second should be read beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated.” Readers unfamiliar with Cortazar’s famous text will likely quickly skip over this allusion, but to those aware of the post-modern text this lexia will ring with a metafictional air of whimsy. As an invitation to make these connections, the default link following this lexia is “Cortazar”, and includes a quote from Blowup: “I leaned up against the wall of my room and was happy because the boy had just managed to escape, I saw him running off, in focus again, springing with his hair flying in the wind, learning finally to fly across the island.”  This excerpt works on both the level of discourse and story. Pointing attention to the discourse Joyce utilizes, the passage links the post-modernist, fragmented narrative techniques of both Antonioni and Cortazar to Joyce’s narrative. On the story level, the quotation can be interpreted to be read as a happy daydream from Peter’s perspective, in which the boy might have escaped possible death after all, or, even more ominously, as the boy learns to finally “fly” away in the act of leaving this world of pain and hurt. This cycle of extra-textual linking continues, through Borges, Legges, Anaïs Nin and others. Joyce’s inclusion of these references is certainly not accidental, and they seem to suggest that his use of the “linking” function of hypertext is twofold – these linked lexias consciously refer to other lexias from the work, but non-linked terms can also refer to other frames of reference – it is up to the conscientious and attentive reader to make the connections work for him or herself. The presence of literary allusions within the text is not unique to electronic fiction, however, the physical linking and changing sequencing of reading patterns just may be.

Furthermore, consider the fact that, despite theorists’ suggestions to the contrary, this text does exist in more than one format. For users who have access to the “author version” of Storyspace, the system allows the reader to write upon the text him or herself, add his or her own links, and, perhaps most importantly, view a global version of the text: a map of the relationships between all the lexias and all the links. For readers who have the “read-only” version of Storyspace, the level of interaction with the text is much more limited. These readers are allowed to only navigate through the text in one of the four modes detailed above, with no clue as to the linking patterns or habits that might appear next. It seems to me, then, that the “author version” of the program allows for a reading closely approximating, though not replicating, a print experience. Readers can insert their own commentary, they can view the links between texts (in a window that is similar to that of an “index” function in the back of a book), and they can have a finite representation of the text at hand via the “global view” that might well act in the same way that the covers of a book could to contain the discourse space. Without knowing, however, the original intent with which Joyce meant for the text to be distributed, it is difficult to approximate the benefits or costs of either version. Does the “read-only” version work in opposition to our cultural understandings of text as finite and searchable? Does the “author version” of the work contradict the ideological underpinnings of the postmodern, fragmentary nature of this story? I think that there are no easy answers to these questions. Yet perhaps the most important thing is that we ask these questions, and, just possibly, be willing to accept that we may not have the answers by the end of the text that we are given.

Related Concepts: Adaptation, Narrative