ABSTRACT
Whether one thinks of a novel from the point of view of the writer writing it, or of the reader reading it, or as the mirroring of an objective series of historical events, or as the following of the line of a life, or as the making up 'out of whole cloth' of a coherent story, one is likely to use models of causal chaining or of organic growth to describe the desirable hanging together of a narrative. So powerful is this assumption of linear continuity that it may easily be imputed to some random collocation of contiguous morsels.
