"Giving the audience access to the raw materials of creation runs the risk of undermining the narrative experience… When in Groundhog Day the conversation at a bar between Phil and Rita is repeated over and over again to show how Phil changes his pickup routine over several days, the sequence looks confusingly like a series of retakes of a single movie scene; I am reminded that I am watching Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell repeating lines for the camera."

-- Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck, 39-40.

Murray dislikes seeing the characters in Groundhog Day as actors, reminding her of her position in the audience. Although Murray is usually not grounded in print aesthetics in Hamlet on the Holodeck (favoring instead aesthetics unique to digital narratives), I think she misses the point on this one. In order to apply her observation to hypertext, we have to evaluate this repetition differently.

For now at least, readers of hypertext are not looking for a suspension of reality or disbelief in their electronic literature. There are many physical barriers in electronic literature that bar readers from "losing themselves" in a text, like getting dry, reddened eyes after sitting in front of a computer monitor for more than three hours. But even if the reader eliminates the physical constraints of reading (by projecting the text on a screen, for example), he/she is obviously not looking for realism, a surrealist escape, or romantic idealism. When I read a hypertext, I am not looking to forget, like in film, that the characters I watch are just actors, and I do not want to be a passive reader. I know going into a hypertext reading that, because I will have to adjust my traditional reading skills, I am not looking for an easy read or for a (primarily) escapist fantasy. To interact with the text, I have to be aware of how the language functions, and how I function as a reader.

I see the repetition of hypertexts as an inherent part of my consciousness of them as texts (and of course, that consciousness is a part of the text's hyper-reflexivity). In order to fully enjoy a multilinear, digital text, one of the tools I use is to notice when repetition occurs and why.