Writers make deliberate choices abo

Writers make deliberate choices about the structure their narratives will assume, and chaotic narratives, as I have defined them, are thus outgrowths of the particular circumstances under which their writers operate, the form integrally related to the thematic content. The strange attractors that I have located in the four texts differ, just as they differ in physical systems in which they are found—the strange attractor generated by the dynamics of the dripping faucet unlike that generated by the dynamics of weather patterns, for example. Yet for each text in this study, the strange-attractor structure arises from powerful thematic content that simultaneously attracts and repels the writers. I would suggest that the bounded randomness of deterministic chaos accrues to a particular subset of narratives, such as the ones that I have examined. Although I do not put forward the strange-attractor model as a global theory about textual dynamics, we need to consider whether all narratives can be evaluated by means of chaos theory. By drawing on these insights the theory makes available to us, we can begin to explore the analogy between dynamical systems and narratives, and, as I suggest in chapter 1, such a line of inquiry is a promising one. By considering a narrative as a dynamical system, we can mediate between notions of narrative as spatial product and temporal process. Narratives can be regarded as fixed patterns whose meaning continuously evolves. As chaos theory demonstrates, simulations of dynamical systems result from a feedback loop between system and dynamicist. Interpretations of narratives similarly result from a feedback loop between text and reader. Although the quality of bounded randomness is a structural element of the four texts I have examined, we can also apply it to the process of meaning-making in general. Narratives— even linear ones—are neither fixed in meaning nor radically indeterminable. They can instead be considered as globally deterministic systems allowing an infinite play of variations at the local level.