In such hypertext fictions as Michael Joyce's Afternoon or Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse, conventional linear narrative flow goes right out the window. Afternoon follows the stream of consciousness of any number of characters, and introduces loops and omissions as appropriate to the character's mental state, which Uncle Buddy's presents itself as wholly exploratory, with a linear story flow only present in the fact that one must "solve" the first part of the work in order to gain access to the next. In both works the contrast with the linear narrative flow of the novel is obvious. However, the move out of the textual paradigm is not purely about nonlinearity, but rather is about using the proper narrative device for each work. In many cases, the story as experienced by the author is holistic rather than mechanistic, and the rigid, mechanistic feel of traditional narrative is unsuited to communicating the work. This escape from traditional modes of narrative is a defining characteristic of the proto-hypertext novels.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a nonlinear work, and it makes this fact known the moment Vonnegut's biographical first chapter ends and the narration begins:

Listen:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.(Vonnegut, 23)

Vonnegut takes the unsubtle but effective move of exploding his narrative from its outset. Having established that his central character knows every event which has ever happened or will happen to him, Vonnegut can feel free to ignore traditional narrative entirely. Instead, he focuses on each scene in Billy Pilgrim's life as a tableau, as it relates to the totality of his existence instead of how it relates to the moments immediately preceding and succeeding it. The worldview of the Tralfamadorians, the aliens which kidnap Billy during the course of the book, seems to express how Vonnegut would like the reader to really experience the novel:

"It would take another Earthling to explain it to you. Earthlings are the great explainers, explaining why this event is structured as it is, telling how other events may be achieved or avoided. I am a Tralfamadorian, seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber." (Vonnegut, 85)

The irony of Slaughterhouse-Five is that the alien's contempt at human's conception of time is actually Vonnegut's self-contempt. Vonnegut was unable to deconstruct narrative to the absolute level he would have liked; although Billy Pilgrim's life is nonlinear, the novel's actual structure is not. Although the proto-hypertext concept of a novel as a interconnected series of lexias, or tableaus, is enforced by the explicit separation of each scene from its chronology, the physical structure of the novel falls short of the hypertextual goal of a diffuse structure. Imagine taking a pair of sharp scissors to a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five and chopping it apart, page by page. Now put the book back together in random order. Billy Pilgrim's life would still make sense -- the series of tableaus produce the same effect on the reader regardless of the order of their consumption -- but the novel itself no longer makes sense. The reason why the physical structure of Slaughterhouse-Five is linear though its logical structure is not is simple: Vonnegut uses traditional narrative form to tell a nontraditional story. A typical transition between tableaus makes this point obvious: "And then Billy was a middle-aged optometrist again...(Vonnegut, 85)", or "And Billy took a very short trip through time..." Vonnegut always alerts the reader to the shift in tableaus, as though the flow of the novel were a tow rope which pulls the reader safely through a series of tableaus.

Contrast Vonnegut's scene transitions with Pynchon's in The Crying of Lot 49, and a vital difference emerges: Lot 49 has none. Admittedly this is an exaggeration, but the transitions between scenes in Pynchon's work are so rapid and matter-of-fact that they can easily be missed. For example, the transition between Oedipa Maas being marooned on an island in a lagoon to watching a Jacobean revenge play is the work of two sentences, one of whom also does the work of finishing the first scene:

The time in between had been whiled away with songs by the Paranoids, and juicing, and feeding pieces of eggplant sandwich to a flock of not too bright seagulls who'd mistaken Fangoso Lagoons for the Pacific, and hearing the plot of The Courier's Tragedy, by Richard Wharfinger, related near to unintelligible by eight memories unlooping progressively into regions as strange to map as their rising coils and clouds of pot smoke. It got so confusions that next day Oedipa decided to go see the play herself, and even conned Metzger into taking her. (Pynchon, 64).

This half-paragraph sentence connects two multiple-page scenes with so little fuss that many readers miss the transition entirely, and grope around for context in the next scene. This is actually one of the more prosaic transitions in The Crying of Lot 49; in other scenes if Oedipa has to travel hundreds of miles from San Narciso to San Francisco, the trip takes a single sentence. Interestingly enough, Pynchon does as much to develop the nonlinearity of narrative as Vonnegut, even though the events of Lot 49 occur in linear order, because he makes the tableau structure of his novel explicit on the narrative level , by intentionally avoiding transition, whereas Vonnegut only brings out the tableau structure of his novel on the physical, plot level.

A diagram will perhaps serve to illustrate this point. If the structure of Slaughterhouse-Five looks like this:

where each box represents a tableau, the numbers represent physical chronology, and the line represents narrative flow, then the structure of Lot 49 would look like this:

because Lot 49 presents its tableaus without apology, and without trying to string them together with a narrative contrivance, but rather forces the reader to interpret the novel as a whole without the assistance of an explanation.

The third proto-hypertext novel, Hopscotch (or Rayuela, as it is known in Spanish), represents a logical continuation of the deconstruction of traditional narrative. In Hopscotch, both logical and narrative linearity are discarded; instead, the book's Table of Contents introduces a new method of narrative flow:

In its own way, this book consists of many books, but two books above all. The first can be read in a normal fashion and it ends with Chapter 56, at the close of which there are three garish little stars which stand for the words The End. Consequently, the reader may ignore what follows with a clean conscience.

The second should be read by beginning with Chapter 73 and then following the sequence indicated at the end of each chapter. . . (Cortazar, iii)

Cortazar puts this continually bifurcating narrative path to good use: at the end of any chapter in the first book, one may split from the "main" narrative, follow any number of side paths, and return seamlessly to the original plot line. Evelyn Picon Garfield, in a work which includes extensive interviews of Cortazar, explains the interrelationship of the two works:

. . . The two searches are intimately related. Oliveira, the protagonist of the traditionally read first book, seeks a more authentic basis for life: through the main character of the second book -- the novel itself -- Cortazar searches for a more authentic form of communication for Oliveira's anguished quest. (Garfield, 85)

Garfield touches upon a very important point here: The novel acts as a character itself, as a navigation device through the logoverse that Cortazar has mapped onto paper. It is especially important that the book as a whole cannot be read in numerical order: the optional chapters (titled From Diverse Sides ) are not arranged in any particular order, and should only be approached with Table of Contents in hand.

To continue the visual analogy, a map of Hopscotch might look something like this: