The fragmented city and the everyday sublime: Multimodal narratives of ordinary lives in Building Stories by Chris Ware

This article analyses the structural fragmentation of Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) and its implications for the construction of character identity. Delivered as a boxed collection of disparate printed materials, Ware’s work exploits intratextuality and collage to challenge conventional storytelling. By so doing, it encourages a non-linear and participatory reading experience, as readers are asked to assemble their own story. Drawing on a multimodal analytical framework, this study aims at analysing how the fragmentation of the graphic narrative functions as a representational strategy that reflects and reinforces the characters’ fractured identities and fragmented perceptions of everyday reality, while identifying the fil rouge that connects the various pieces that make up the work in its entirety.