non-linear narratives

[truepenny]

I am going to try very hard to ask this question in a way that will make sense. Bear with me.

I'm wondering what reasons there are for telling a story out of order. Let me be clear: I mean REASONS, not DEVICES. For example, you can have a narrative that starts at a wedding and is a series of flashbacks interspersed with the ceremony to show you how these two people ended up marrying each other (and trust me, if I were actually writing that story, their motivations would not be romantic). But that's not a reason to tell the story out of order; it's a device to structure that non-linear sequencing.

What I'm after is why. WHY does a story need, as some stories inarguably do, to be told in a nonlinear fashion? What are the thematic and structural underpinnings that will show the reader the choice is about something other than showing off?

Am I making any sense at all?

Comments

[libskrat]

You might want to take a look at critical commentary on Howard Pinter's Betrayal. As best I recall, the reverse-order chronology foregrounds the "Gah, what an awful situation, how did these people *get* here?" question, refuses to allow the audience to get sentimental about the characters (rather Brechtian, actually), and lends *considerable* irony to the play's end, which is the chronological beginning.