Do chapters (in novels) serve any useful purpose? What are they for, exactly?
I note that Terry Pratchett, for example, usually manages without them (although his new book does have them, so I hear)
Lots of purposes: allowing for a change of scene, letting you do a POV change, breaking the story into convenient sections so the reader can take a break, etc.
Pratchett manages OK without them, but most authors use a good chapter break to build suspense and keep the story moving.
Chapters are just a higher level way of breaking text than, say, paragraphs.
Try to imagine a novel without paragraph breaks.
A paragraph typically follow certain common “rules”. E.g., the first sentence sets things up. The next sentences flush out the idea. The last sentence sums things up. If you run them all together, you’d get summation followed by set up of a different idea, etc. The same structure can be used with chapters but at a higher level.
Pratchett uses breaks in all of his Discworld novels. He’ll write a scene featuring certain characters at a certain time at a certain place. Then he’ll skip a line or two and start a new scene about other characters at other times and other places. Then he slips in a couple of blank lines and writes yet a different scene. These are chapters in all but name. Other writers will do exactly the same thing, but stop every 20 pages or so and put in a page saying Chapter 2 or 3 or 36. Same technique just hidden under a curtain.
There are other variants. Edgar Rice Burroughs used to write books with two strands of action and simply alternate chapters from one to the other.
Mystery authors and others used to write chapters with cliffhangers built into every last line to force readers to keep turning the page so that never had the easy excuse of closing the book at a chapter ending and never picking the book up again.
You can do it anyway you want you think you’re good enough to get away with.
Was it you or someone else who asked this exact (and rather strange) question several months ago? When I saw it the first time I got the sense someone was whooshing us.