Literature and Binders

by ~Lady-Succubus

The way John (both the character and the author) presents, or structures, the story is an interesting choice for any novel. It isn’t just a frame story. To use the same metaphor, it’s really an open, one sided framed story with a scrambled chronology and bits and shards of frames stuck randomly into the content. Its structure is so deviant from the general definition of frame that a different word is needed. This structure, hereinafter a binder structure, actually works well for the story. Like a binder, the events in the beginning of the story are quite random (in the case of the binder it would be the stack of papers in the beginning before the student figures out a proper organization scheme), like can be expected from any childhood. The reader understands this, as her memories of her childhood are probably organized in the same way. Then comes the first divider, “sliver of frame,” or narrative from the present. This also makes sense – after a long, boring narrative from various parts of his younger years, John was smart to decide to present a glimpse into his more modern self. Then he presents the next set of events (or documents) and the pattern simply repeats, until the end. The end section, like the bright, multicolored piece of paper kept in the back of a binder that is meant to attract peers’ attentions, provides a final explosive conclusion for the reader to hold onto. It is a scene that was best left for the end, where there is nothing left to distract the reader from the significance and meaning of the scene. Adding anything else would be like placing a sheet of binder paper over the multicolored sheet of paper in the binder – making it effectively useless.