The Fracture and Leap Cycle: Quantifying Narrative Surprise and Structural Resilience in Flash Fiction

The Fracture and Leap Cycle: Quantifying Narrative Surprise and Structural Resilience in Flash Fiction | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Article The Fracture and Leap Cycle: Quantifying Narrative Surprise and Structural Resilience in Flash Fiction Sungpil Wang This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8619161/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract This study investigates the structural and semantic dynamics of compressed narratives by analysing a filtered corpus of 2,636 Korean flash fiction stories. By leveraging sentence-level trajectories of surprisal, coherence, and semantic shift, the research models how information flow is managed under extreme length constraints. Clustering of normalised surprisal curves identifies five distinct structural archetypes, which are further categorised into two primary regimes: a “timing-driven” group focused on the strategic placement of climactic shocks, and an “attenuated” group defined by diffuse or bimodal information structures. An analysis of 3,889 significant surprisal events uncovers a robust “fracture and leap” cycle—where informational peaks induce localised coherence collapse while facilitating thematic reorientation—as a fundamental mechanic of narrative impact. The results demonstrate that the severity of this trade-off and the subsequent recovery dynamics vary systematically across these archetypes, distinguishing highly elastic “fast-reset” frameworks from those emphasising atmospheric persistence. These findings characterise flash fiction as a finely calibrated system of cognitive load management and provide a language-agnostic, transferable computational framework for formalist narrative analysis. Physical sciences/Mathematics and computing Physical sciences/Physics Flash fiction Computational narratology Narrative archetypes Surprisal Discourse signals Korean literature Full Text Additional Declarations No competing interests reported. Supplementary Files calculatesurprisal.py booklistsummary.csv checksentstats.py environment.yaml requirements.txt coherencetopiccalc.py README.md SupplementaryInformation.pdf flashfictionwithsurprisalcoherencesemantic.csv FlashFictionAnalysis.ipynb Cite Share Download PDF Status: Posted Version 1 posted You are reading this latest preprint version Research Square lets you share your work early, gain feedback from the community, and start making changes to your manuscript prior to peer review in a journal. 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