Nonlinear Narratives
Anyone who has read stream of consciousness fiction knows that print need not be structured linearly. For example, you'd be hard pressed to argue that James Joyce's Ulysses , or William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury were "linear." But it's the narrative of those works that makes them nonlinear. Because they are in print, however, they have a linearity forced upon them: the first page is the beginning, and the last page is the end of the work. The narratives of those works are not bound by the first and last page.Print, however, falsely imposes a beginning, middle, and end because of the physical entity of the book. The physical book is a considered a whole, because it's easy to see the book's boundaries (the cover and the binding, etc.). It has a physical presence and we can easily discern where the book starts and where it ends--not necessarily so with the narrative or the story on the pages of the book, but for the book itself.
Many printed works fall perfectly in line with the linear structure imposed upon them. Many works now include an index which allows readers to more easily scan for information they're looking for. But for the most part, printed works are constructed to be read from beginning to end.
Linearity and Print
An Introduction?