Despite having been present in the scholarly discourse since its very beginning, the question “What is literature?” has yet to be fully answered. This may be because the majority of attempts to define it have focused only on the written word. The potential significance of the typographical layout of a text, let alone the physical shape of its container, seem to have been overlooked by many critics, authors and readers alike. However, the concept of a literary work as a creative totality in which the text and its physical realization are equally important to its meaning has been reappearing for decades and has inspired some authors to break the constraints of the literary canon.

One of the most vocal advocates of seeking new forms of literary expression was B.S. Johnson, a British author whose extraordinary oeuvre gained him a position among the world's most relentless experimentalists. This paper investigates the aesthetic measures employed by Johnson in his most extreme work, The Unfortunates (1969), in terms of their efficacy in establishing an interactive relationship between the novel and its reader. It seeks to prove that Johnson's novel published in a box containing 27 independently bound units intended to be read in an almost random order activates the reader's cognitive processes more effectively than the sequential reading of a bound book.

In the introduction to Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Own Memoirs?, his most outspoken literary manifesto, Johnson explains his reasoning behind the creation of The Unfortunates. Being determined to remain as faithful to reality as possible, he refused to accept the fixed order of the traditional volume which, in his opinion, would not allow to recreate the haphazardness of the mind, his mind, at work (Johnson 1973: 25). Jonathan Coe, Johnson's biographer, echoes the writer’s sentiment claiming that the experimental form of The Unfortunates was aimed to produce “a tangible metaphor for the random interplay of memories and impressions in the human mind” (Coe 2005: 22). Indeed, complete reading of The Unfortunates reveals a semi-autobiographical story told in the first person, in which the protagonist's (most probably Johnson's own) perceptions of the present intervene with inadvertent retrospections.