Straight Lines and Circles

I have noticed an increase lately in stories - both in books and in films or television programmes - which are not told in chronological order.

 

They open half-way through the action and the reader or viewer is challenged to keep up as the narrative weaves between past and present, often with little signposting as to where the action is occurring.

 

It seems that to tell a story in the 'right order' - in the order that the events occurred is too ordinary.

 

However, to tell a story in a non-chronological order now seems the norm.  It has become ordinary and, perhaps, overused.

 

I wonder if this shift away from chronological structuring is a reflection of our fractured and fragmented understanding of the world around us, especially compared to our predecessors, who had a shared understanding of who they were and where they were going.  With a multiplicity of options available to us today with regards to where we live, where we work, when we work, what we do in our spare time, what we believe - morally, politically and religiously etc., is it any wonder that this variety of options has made its way into our story-telling too?

 

Rather than adhering to a grand narrative, we have created a pick-and-mix form of narrating, where we choose what we want in a story and the order in which we want it.  Moreover, with the increase in social media, we are used to telling our own stories in small snippets - Facebook statuses are usually short and snappy, and Twitter imposes a 140 character limit on all tweets, forcing us to condense our stories into short fragments.

 

Perhaps there is also a preoccupation with the past evident in these texts which circle back on themselves.  A desire to revisit memories in order to better understand them and to understand where we have come from in order to move forwards.

 

Whilst chronological texts are usually much easier to read - and to keep up with - perhaps this (relatively) modern inclination to tell a story in a disjointed or fragmented way, which circles back on itself and dips into the past and the future, is a more realistic representation of life. 

 

We live our lives in a straight line, on one level, but we are always projecting dreams and hopes and worries into the future and are constantly reflecting on and revisiting the past - both literally and mentally. 

 

Our lives are composed of both straight lines and circles and it is therefore perhaps unsurprising that our narratives are too.