Coherence, as a basic standard of textuality, is achieved by text linguistic factors and compositional patterns. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that combines text linguistics, cognitive and narrative concerns, the article reviews the principles of text coherence, i.e. the standards of time, causality, thematic unity and continuity, and focuses on literary narratives characterized by various degrees of coherence. It explores the impact of narrative aspects and categories, such as temporal organization, frequency and plot completeness on the reader’s mental contribution in perceiving local and global coherence in the course of interpreting texts. Further exploiting the challenges to text coherence, it argues that establishing unity in literary texts relies on the receiver’s background knowledge, his or her ability to draw inferences, fill in ellipsis and retrieve contextually relevant information.