The Definitely Written War and Peace

Yes, you must read through to the end. That is the way to the beauty.

A book offers us a text which ... tells us something that cannot be modified. Suppose you are reading Tolstoy's ‘War and Peace’: you desperately wish that Natasha will not accept the courtship of that miserable scoundrel Anatoly; you desperately wish that the marvellous person who is Prince Andrey will not die, and that he and Natasha will live together forever. If you had ‘War and Peace’ on a hypertextual and interactive CD-ROM, you could rewrite your own story according to your desires; you could invent innumerable ‘War and Peaces’, where Pierre Besuhov succeeds in killing Napoleon, or, according to your penchants, Napoleon definitely defeats General Kutusov. What freedom, what excitement! Every Bouvard or Pécuchet could become a Flaubert!

Alas, with an already written book, whose fate is determined by repressive, authorial decision, we cannot do this. We are obliged to accept fate and to realise that we are unable to change destiny. A hypertextual and interactive novel allows us to practice freedom and creativity, and I hope that such inventive activity will be implemented in the schools of the future. But the already and definitely written novel ‘War and Peace’ does not confront us with the unlimited possibilities of our imagination, but with the severe laws governing life and death.

—Umberto Eco