Thus, Ware’s graphic novel presents itself as a prominent candidate among fictions that subvert the conventional relation of the book’s body with narrative discourse. The different documents cannot be satisfactorily arranged to establish any singular narrative order. The novel-in- fragments follows the overlapping lives of several characters who once lived on the different floors of a multistoried brownstone apartment in Chicago.

Ware’s experimental and unique “book” is made up of fourteen printed documents, ranging from booklets to broadsheets, enclosed in a box. In this article, after briefly enumerating narrative fictions that experiment with the book’s body and outlining the scholarly attempts to study them, I use the rhetorical approach, which understands narratives as acts of purposive communication from authors to readers, to analyze Chris Ware’s graphic novel, Building Stories (2012). Depending on the manner in which such reconfigurations of the textual form inflect the reader’s overall narrative experience, these narrative fictions risk coming across as gimmicky, fetishizing an older media object, or end up being successful examinations of the affordances of the book’s body in the face of emerging media technologies. These fictions may or may not be born digital, but they insist on being engaged in print, which, in turn, reinstates the relationship of printed books with the bodies of readers who physically hold them and turn their pages. The book’s body emerges as a topos in narrative fictions at the interface of print and digital cultures.

Building stories ware