Law and Order:Criminal Intent episode The
Maltese Cross.
I can’t remember the title or even the details but I once read a neat Sci fi short story where the story you were reading was basically like an alien virus and the implication was that by reading it you were allowing it to multiply. I remember it being really cool and well done.
The structure is routine, but the set up of Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream is definitely unique. Once you open the book, the actual title is revealed as Lords of the Swastika by noted space opera author Adolph Hitler, who, as the biography indicates, “dabbled in radical politics” before emigrating to the US and becoming an SF artist and writer. The narrative is a parody both of Sword and Sorcery novels and the entire Nazi movement.
Irreversible. Thirteen scenes in reverse chronological order. Various techniques (and some of the imagery) make the movie uncomfortable to watch.
Iain Pears does this a lot.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is a Restoration-era Rashomon-like novel, in which the same story is told by several unreliable narrators.
Even more strikingly, his latest novel Arcadia, a time travel extravaganza, has ten different story strands - apparently he’s made an app so that readers can track them all! (I read the book without the app, and it was fun anyway):
The first chapter of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury” consists of the impressions and memories of a mentally retarded man. Hence, the “narrative” jumps around to different times in his life.
Steven King had a novel whos name escapes me (but some nice Doper will probably provide) which is told from beginning to end in dialog, no chapters, no paragraphs (outside of the dialog anyway) that I can recall.
it was interestingly done.
I haven’t seen Rashomon, but reading the synopsis I think what Fingerpost accomplished is much harder. Firstly because the narrators hardly ever overtly contradict each other - just wrap the same events in an entirely different interpretation - and second because the actual meaning of the story changes at each step, till what started as just a murder mystery ends up being about espionage, national politics and religious freedom.
I’m sure Rashomon’s a good film too.
Actually I found *Rashomon *a bit tedious, once you’ve got the idea.
Time’s Arrow (novel) by Martin Amis tell sthe story of a man’s life as viewed in reverse (e.g., you recieve raw materials from the toilet, up your bum, process them into foodstuffs in your gut, spit them out, wrap them, take them to the store to exchange them for money.)
A dense read but absolutely riveting. +1
If you liked Fingerpost, you should check out Arcadia if you haven’t already.
National Lampoon had a story named something like “Don’t Give Away the Beginning” which was a good story, but had the paragraphs printed in reverse order. It was about 1979.
All of their back issues were on archives.org but has been taken down for copyright reasons. I don’t know where to find it now.
“Repent Harlequin” said the ticktockman, a short story by Harlan Ellison. It starts in the middle, then jumps around a lot.
It’s also got a great title.
Urusla K LeGuin’s The Dispossessed switches between “present” and “flashback” in alternate chapters. It’s confusing at first.
Going all the way back The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, while ostensibly the autobiography of the title character, goes off on so many digressions and musings that the birth of the character isn’t portrayed until Volume III and very little of the book covers his life.
The video game Bioshock: Infinite has a pretty interesting story structure.
It plays a big off of the future and the past and dimensions and stuff.
Just put it on hold from the library 
I’m glad to see someone has mentioned The Disposessed too. One of the really nice things about the structure of that book is that the theory the physicist protagonist is working on in the course of the book is “the Theory of Simultanaity” - ie, working out how to get around the restrictions that space-time imposes on us. So the fact that his life is being shown as if his childhood and adulthood are happening at the exact same time is directly relevant to the whole theme of the book.
The book Cloud Atlas has a structure where you get in the 1st story then the 2nd then the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th until you reach the middle and then you go back from the 6th to the 5th to the 4th etc all the way back to the 1st so that the structure is symmetrical, right? How does it link up those narratives and go from one to the next?
How come the movie didn’t follow that structure? Was it better or worse for it?
How did it change the way you think?
Is there any rhyme to the way it switches between the storylines?
What’s in the middle? How does it seem to determine what to jump around to?
Have there been reverse forms of the Hero’s Journey?
The Captive, a movie with Ryan Reynolds. I wouldn’t call it a great movie, but it jumps in time so much that I really had no idea what was going on until I read the plot outline online.