Abstract: The ground hypothesis of this paper is that narratives are not per se linear or fractured: linearity and fragmentariness are interpretive achievements. Readers interested in the experience of coherence tend to find linearity in every narrative, while those who like the representation of a fractured human condition will hardly experience linearity anywhere. The hypothesis is tested through four examples. The first one could be regarded as the most obvious example of linear narratives The Three Musketeers. A careful reading of its "Introduction" suggests that this text tends to advertise its fictionality, continuously plays with the focalization, undermines the identity of the characters, destabilizes the chronology, and challenges linearity. The second example is a popular narrative, a Hungarian adventure novel from the 1930s, which should be really simple from the viewpoint of narrative management of time, but it is not. The abrupt narrative becomes linear in retrospection through the eye of a reader, and detective-like story-creating achievement of the main protagonists. The result that narratives traditionally described as linear may seem actually fractured to a reader schooled in post-modern literature is tested in the counterexamples of two highly sophisticated narratives, which are both fragmentary and post-colonial, Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown (2005) and Ludmila Ulitskaya's Medea and Her Children (1997). Despite all fragmentariness and fascinating multiperspective narrative techniques, it is not really difficult to see the main family stories in those novels evolving in time linearly. Really linear narratives might have never existed and even the highly artistic fractured narratives of contemporary literature can be read as linear.

Key words: narrative, linearity, fragmentariness, post-colonial, perspective