Worlds with the unpredictable past: eventual invertibility in forking-path narrative

In this article the author examines the invertibility of the event in contemporary forking-path narratives which have been actively represented in novels and films in recent decades. The forking-path narratives are multilinear and represented several variants of the same hero’s life, thereby varying the same events and making some of them invertible for the reader. Such functioning of the event within the forking-path narrative involves the problematization of the reader’s narrative expectations and narrative emotions, including such so-called “narrative universals” (according to M. Sternberg) as curiosity, suspense and surprise. The invertibility of an event in a forking-path narrative produces several effects: such functioning of the event creates both the effect of “miraculous security” (in one variation the hero died, in the other he is still alive, “returns” to the reader), and the effect of unpredictability, since the invertibility of events in this type of narrative cannot be predicted by the reader. The effect of unpredictability (and the emotion of surprise associated with it) is only enhanced by other temporal distortions in the forking-path narrative: the event becomes invertible due to several elements of the reverse story, reversing what is happening, and several elements of the iterative story, suggesting a return to what has already happened before. As a result, the invertibility of an event in a forking-path narrative creates a narrative world in which the reader, even moving forward along the event line, is always forced to go back, reliving that “past”, variations of which in the proposed narrative turn out to be unpredictable.