Digital fiction and unnatural narrative

This chapter explores ways in which unnatural narrative manifests in digital fiction. We begin by introducing and critiquing the different and partly deviating concepts and definitions of unnatural narrative and propose our own understanding of the term. We analyse two features of digital fiction which we argue have become somewhat conventional unnatural phenomena within that context: narrative contradiction in multilinear hypertext fi ction (cf. Bell 2013) and interactional metalepsis (Bell 2016; Ensslin 2011: 11; cf. Kukkonen 2011) in literary games (Ensslin 2014a). The chapter shows that digital fiction allows unnatural narrative to manifest in ways that must be analysed according to the affordances of the medium (cf. Hayles 2004) as well as the wider networked and participatory culture in which they are produced.