Unstuck in time! yes, thats the central style of narration the Slaughterhouse 5 (aka.
The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death) by Kurt Vonnegut. The style of narration is unique as the central character(Billy Pilgrim) moves back and forth in time describing various events, complete disregard to cuasality. Its as if the each paragraph is generated by a random sampling of the space time(ST) volume(imagine stacking all the snapshots of a movie together) generated in the entire lifetime of the author's life. Recent research in computer vision aims to describe actions by looking at the ST volume generated by it. Not all voxels of the ST volme are interesting and you need a notion of what is "interesting". At a very low level, regions with high variance in space and time are interesting to look at.
Non linear story telling can be extremetly interesting if done well. It breaks the monotony, gives enough hints for the reader to guess the next part and nothing beats the effect of when the story turns out to be totally different than what you were guessing. Movies like memento, the usual suspects are classic examples of this.
Still, unstuck in space
No comments:
Post a Comment