In a normal story you have a book and you flip through pages. Each page occurs in the same order every time you read it. However, in hypertext the pages do not appear in a certain order. There are many different ways to read it because there are many different links on each page. One page leads to many other pages making the story not occur in the same order every time. Hypertext is nonlinear. It is a story that is written without a definite beginning, middle, and end.
“Since hypertexts are structured as networks rather than linear plots, they lend themselves to openness and disorientation” (Steve Ersinghaus, Reading Hypertext: Reading Blue Hyacinth http://www.steveersinghaus.com/archives/1142 ) There is Openness in that when you read the story multiple times, what you read is different from what you will read in the future. No story will be read by each person exactly the same way. There is also openness in your interpretation. Since, there is no particular way to go through a story, what you take from the story changes depending on what you read when. There is also disorientation in that you might not understand the story and the pieces may not fit together in an understandable way. Disorientation can occur when there is no ending; some hypertexts are continuous in a loop. “The navigational aspect of hypertext changes our interaction with both the story at hand and also with the concept of narrative itself.” (Steve Ersinghaus, Reading Hypertext: Reading Blue Hyacinth http://www.steveersinghaus.com/archives/1142 )
Hypertext Fiction/Narrative can be read in many ways. In one story, Blue Hyacinth by Mazurel and Andrews, you read the story by scrolling over the words and four different stories combine into one. As you can see in the below screen shots, sentences change and you have a mix of different sentences from the different stories. Because of this there are many different ways to read it. You may never read it the same way twice. There is no beginning of the story or an end. It is nonlinear. However, each story can be read on its own. There is a box at the bottom with four different colors. When you click on a certain color box there is that whole story in the respective color. When the stories are jumbled up the lines for the certain stories stay the color they were originally so that you can see which story it came from.
Patchwork Girl is a hypertext about a girl that is sewn together with different pieces of other people and made to be a person, but instead she is a monster. She has patches and is put together like a quilt. The story is put together the same way. Just like she is put together by many different people, the hypertext has many different narrators and authors. Mary Shelley is one of the narrators and authors. In the hypertext she is the creator of Patchwork Girl. She writes about her experiences with Patchwork Girl. In real life, she is the creator Frankenstein, the novel. Shelley Jackson is another narrator/author because she wrote the hypertext and talks about her experiences writing the hypertext in her story. Patchwork Girl is also a narrator/author because in most of the hypertext she is talking about her experiences being the monster and where her body parts came from. The different narrators of the story create disorientation because figuring out who is narrating at the time is confusing. This is why (as you can see below) it is by Mary/Shelley, & Herself. It is already confusing and it is already making you think. As you read the story you understand that the Mary comes from Mary Shelley, the Shelley comes from Shelley Jackson, and Herself comes from Patchwork Girl herself. Finally, the reader is an author. This is because the reader creates their own story because they follow their own path through the story because it is not linear.
Patchwork Girl by Jackson, works the same way a my body—a Wunderkammer. When you read it you click on different words in the text and it leads you a different page of text. The pages also do not always make sense together. On each page you can click on many things that will lead to many other pages. There is not just one path. This a characteristic of a good hypertext. In Patchwork Girl there is also a thematic connection, another characteristic of a good hypertext. The story is disconnected, has different perspectives, and has different aspects that are taken together to make a thematic connection. One theme has to do with finding your identity. Patchwork Girl has issues with this because she was created not born and therefore does not have a past. She also has troubles with her identity because she is made up of many different people. She does not fit in with society’s identity of a girl and battles with that as an identity issue. As seen in the screen shot below she has many issues which lead to her identity confusion.
Another theme is feminism. Patchwork Girl has issues being the feminine ideal because she is big and monstrous and women are supposed to be petite and gentle. She wants to conform to society and be the way society sees femininity, but her body will not allow it. Yet she tries to make her body do these feminine things. This is explained more fully in the screen shot below.
Mary Shelley the character also shows how feminism is a theme. She has to always be conscious of what her husband, Percy, wants. For example and as you can see in the below screen shot, Patchwork Girl leaves her creator Mary Shelley for good. Mary Shelley wishes she had given Patchwork Girl a piece of herself so that she will always be with Patchwork Girl, but in this wish she must think of her husband and she could only choose a piece of herself that her husband will not miss. Also after Patchwork Girl leaves, Mary Shelley is confronted by her husband about her strange personality lately. All she has to say is women issues and her husband leaves her alone because he wants nothing to do with those. However, it is really due to her missing Patchwork Girl.
