What I find most fascinating about proto-hypertext is the way in which it deals with the concept of choice on both a reader level and a character level. In most hypertext works, the concept that the reader has a choice in how he or she will navigate the work's logoverse. Character choice, on the other hand, seems unchanged as compared to traditional novels; although the characters might make different choices depending on how one transverses the logoverse, their capacity for free will is intact. In all three proto-hypertexts, though, reader choice is increased above that in a traditional text, but character choice is actually decreased.. As each text divides itself into a number of tableaus, the amount of character free will possible within each tableau seems to decrease. It is uncanny: the process seems to be a zero-sum game . It seems as if the tradeoff between reader and character choice is such that the ultimate proto-hypertext would consist of a huge number of sentences which could be read in any order, which individually are nonsensical but collaborate to create a logoverse. Interestingly enough, Vonnegut describes an eerily similar work when discussing a Tralfamadorian novel in Slaughterhouse-Five:

Billy couldn't read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out - in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

"Exactly," said the voice.

"They are telegrams?"

"There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message - describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time." (Vonnegut, 88)

The extent to which the characters in these proto-hypertexts are trapped like bugs in amber appears to directly relate to the extent to which the reader may navigate independently among the lexias, or tableaus, of the novel. Billy Pilgrim, for example, is trapped by the events around him to continually repeat the events of his life in a random order. Yet, even though Billy's physical acts are severely constrained, his internal mental life is relatively unfettered. He has full knowledge of his unique existence, and even later in life reveals all he has learned about time travel and being abducted by aliens. In fact, Billy seems to even exhibit unconscious control over his path through time, as Stanley Schatt notes he appears to return to Dresden before its firebombing, over and over again, as if he is attempting to deal with his feelings about that holocaust (Schatt, 88). Billy Pilgrim is a bug in amber, but he knows that he is a bug in amber, and is content with his lot.

In contrast, Oedipa Maas of The Crying of Lot 49 is distinctly unhappy about her lack of choices. She is led around by the nose throughout the novel by the posthumous machinations of Pierce Inverarity; in addition, she is continually oppressed by a sense of inertia. Because of Pynchon's advanced development of the tableau method, Oedipa seems trapped in each physical location she visits, with transitions not representing freedom but rather the shift to a new prison. This theme of entrapment pervades the novel; when inside buildings, she feels trapped like a bug under glass, while outdoor scenes leave her with the impression of the surrounding countryside as a circuit board (Pynchon, 24) or a maze (181).

In a particularly insightful moment of his dissertation, Douglas Keesey hit upon the connection between Oedipa's inability to act and the shift to the proto-hypertext paradigm:

... Pynchon has also anticipated the widespread misunderstanding of deconstruction, the mistaken assumption that deconstruction is synonymous with the destruction of meaning. Pynchon's characters, like some interpreters of deconstruction, see the effect of changing contexts as the destruction of meaning only because meaning, for them, must be totally certain, absolute, beyond the limitations of space and time. Only those who believe that words should provide access to transcendent knowledge -- those with a faith in logocentric metaphysics -- will read the dependence of a words meaning on context as the destruction of meaning. For characters like Oedipa, the discovery that verbal meaning is context-specific and not a means of clairvoyance can only be disillusioning. (Keesey, 140).

Although Keesey is here referring to deconstructionism, he has unwittingly demonstrated my point: In changing a book from being itself a text into it being a navigation device through a text, Pynchon has cut loose the anchors of absolutism and textual authority. This effect, disillusioning as it can be because of its close resemblance to deconstruction, is mirrored within the text itself in the disillusioning, and subsequent paralysis, of Oedipa Maas.

Again, the continuum of increasing hypertextuality continues from Vonnegut to Pynchon to its logical conclusion in Cortazar. Cortazar explicitly and implicitly treats each scene as a tableau, and as a result his characters are even more trapped in time and space. For example, Oliveira realizes that his lover's baby is very sick, and may die if it is not treated; yet he takes no action to help the child. Why is he frozen with inaction? One might borrow from Vonnegut, and say the moment was structured that way. For the tableau construction of Hopscotch to work, there can be no change within each tableau; a tableau must, rather, represent the totality of one moment in time. Oliveira takes no action to help the child, but in other tableaus he might, or might not, do so. Character and plot development are not intended to occur in Hopscotch as a result of instantaneous change; in fact, Cortazar has admitted that he dislikes using `dramatic' scenes because they make the reader too passive (Garfield, 107). In the proto-hypertext paradigm, scenes with action and drama relegate the reader to the role of viewer; static tableaus, where the reader must constantly stay in motion in order for the story to unfold, draw the reader into a active role. This change in focus for the reader is a strong indication of what would be the successor of proto-hypertext: true computerized hypertext itself, in which the reader has no choice but to take action.