The contract model treats the opening pages as opening a set of obligations to the reader, each of which the rest of the book must honour. The metaphor comes from the older critical language of the narrative or generic contract and from reader-response criticism’s interest in the expectations a text licenses. Its value is diagnostic, since it turns make the opening better into separate questions with separate remedies. Its danger is mechanical application, which produces a first page visibly discharging obligations instead of telling a story. Five contracts are set out below, and a sixth is proposed.
Voice: what it will be like to read this book
The voice contract tells the reader what it will be like, sentence by sentence, to be inside the book, through distance, diction and rhythm, and reliability. Narrative distance is how close the narration stands to a character’s mind. Genette’s Narrative Discourse (translated by Jane E. Lewin, 1980) separates who speaks from who perceives, and James Wood’s How Fiction Works (2008) gives an accessible account of free indirect style, third-person narration coloured by a character’s own words and judgements. The same event can be told from far off (The woman crossed the yard), close (She kept to the gravel. The grass would be soaked, and she had one dry pair of shoes left) or from inside the mind (Gravel. Not the grass, not today). Each is competent, but the opening chooses, and a book that opens far off and drifts inward by chapter three has not deepened, it has wobbled, unless the drift is patterned.
Reliability, Wayne Booth’s subject in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), is signalled in an opening not as a verdict on whether the narrator lies but as a reading protocol: take this at face value, or read it with suspicion. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) begins Call me Ishmael, an instruction about what to call him, a name offered for convenience whose relation to the truth is left open. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) the butler calls a short motoring holiday the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days and approaches his own intention as if it were weather he is observing; nothing is said about repression, and the syntax enacts it. Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017), a commercial novel narrated by a finance clerk in Glasgow, begins: When people ask me what I do – taxi drivers, hairdressers – I tell them I work in an office. The sentence is about how she deflects questions, and its examples, the only people who ask, show how few people ask her anything; she reports her life accurately and misreads it, and the opening teaches the reader to hear both. Under-delivery of the voice contract is interchangeable competence, and over-delivery a style so insistent that it hides the situation.
Genre: what kind of book this is
The genre contract tells the reader what kind of book this is, and therefore what to expect, hope for and fear: its scale, its tone, whether its world’s rules match ours, and what to watch for. It is the cheapest contract to discharge, because the reader’s horizon supplies the schema, and the cost of getting it wrong is lopsided. A reader promised a thriller and given a domestic novel feels defrauded however good the domestic novel is, while a reader promised less merely puts down a book she would have liked.
The technique that works for an unfamiliar world is normalisation: the strange element arrives as subordinate information inside a sentence about something else, treated by the viewpoint character as unremarkable. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) begins with a weather report, It was a bright cold day in April, and ends the sentence and the clocks were striking thirteen: in fourteen words the strangeness arrives in the tone of the temperature, and the reader is taught that details here are load-bearing. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) begins We slept in what had once been the gymnasium, nine words in which the tense implies a before and a rupture, the pronoun a confined collective and the gymnasium a civic space put to other use. J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) promises the fantastic by the vehemence with which the Dursleys insist they are perfectly normal, thank you very much. Set against these, an announcing sentence such as In this world, magic was real discharges the genre contract and damages every other.
Character: whose eyes, and what they want now
The character contract tells the reader whose eyes she has borrowed and why she should care what they see next. Its engine is the immediate want, which is often confused with the story-goal. The goal of the book, to expose the conspiracy or survive the winter, usually cannot be felt on page one, because the reader lacks the context to weigh it; page one needs something smaller, such as getting out of a conversation, finishing the till or not answering the phone. Dwight Swain’s Techniques of the Selling Writer (1965) set out the scene as goal, conflict and disaster, and the goal can be trivial so long as it is legible and resisted. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) opens on such a want already in motion, Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself; Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), in Constance Garnett’s translation, lets the reader infer one from a young man walking slowly, as though in hesitation, towards a bridge. The subtler half is interiority as selection: a character shows herself less by what she feels than by what she notices, the scorched milk and the unpaid bill where another would see light on the tiles. And sympathy is not required; investment is. Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) opens in the voice of a man the reader should despise and holds her by verbal seduction, so that she is charmed by Humbert before she is asked to judge him, which is the book’s ethical design.
World: a real place whose rules the book knows
The world contract tells the reader that there is a real place here, with rules, and that the book knows them. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957) made circumstantial particularity, named places, exact times, specific objects, constitutive of the novel’s realism, and Roland Barthes’s “The Reality Effect” (1968) argued that some details signify nothing but reality itself, so that three exact things outperform a paragraph of general scenery. The rules of a place are shown by what the viewpoint character fails to find remarkable. A world can be established as atmosphere, as the fog of Dickens’s Bleak House (1853) makes Chancery’s obscurity the reader’s condition before anyone suffers from it; as a system of value, as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) begins with what Umuofia esteems; as material condition, as Balzac’s Père Goriot specifies the boarding house’s rent because the lodgers are what it makes them; or as rupture, as in Atwood’s gymnasium. Strong openings usually choose one and imply the others.
Stakes: why here, and what pulls the reader on
The stakes contract tells the reader why the book began here and what question will pull her forward. The pull-forward question is the working form of Barthes’s hermeneutic code (S/Z, 1970, translated by Richard Miller), the means by which a narrative poses an enigma and delays its answer. Its useful division is between planting, which creates a question the reader knows she has (why won’t she answer her brother’s calls?), and withholding, which conceals what the reader does not know is missing or knows is being kept from her; coy narration that declines to name what the viewpoint character plainly knows breaks the voice contract to serve the stakes contract. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) begins 124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. A number stands where a name belongs, the reader must infer a house, a spite and a baby, and the withheld information is bounded, which separates it from obscurity. Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925), in Breon Mitchell’s translation, opens on Josef K.’s arrest without having done anything wrong, and its must have been adopts K.’s own hypothesis, so that the reader receives the enigma and a warning about her guide in one sentence. Cost completes the contract: a want with no price for failure is a preference, and the price needs only to be real to this character.
A proposed sixth: the formal contract
The five contracts come from a realist account in which the reader’s questions concern the represented world, but readers of an opening also learn how the book is built. The formal contract, proposed here, is what the opening teaches about the book’s structural conventions: person and tense, the handling of time, the unit of division, any apparatus of documents, notes or epigraphs, and whether one consciousness or several will carry it. A late change in any of these reads as error or gimmick, and the severest case is the viewpoint: a book that spends forty pages in one mind and then moves meets resistance in proportion to the attachment it built, which is why books with several viewpoints usually declare the pattern at the first chapter break. Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) declares its handling of time in its first sentence, which in Gregory Rabassa’s translation sets a future firing squad, a present of remembering and a remembered afternoon of discovering ice in twenty-six words, so that the novel’s loops arrive as the fulfilment of a rule. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo (2017) declares its form before its place, as “Worked Analyses” shows. Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) is the doubtful case: it opens in a schoolboy’s we, which vanishes as the narration becomes impersonal, and critics still disagree whether that is a flaw, the residue of a draft or a way of showing Charles from outside before the book enters Emma.
The objection is that five is enough: person, tense and distance belong to voice, conventions of apparatus belong to genre, and a sixth dilutes a model whose virtue is compactness. The defence is that readers do not experience structure as voice or genre, that its failures and remedies are distinct, and that a book which misdeclares its viewpoints has a structural fault the five cannot name. This chapter adopts the formal contract for diagnosis and concedes that the five cover most revision problems. The Ending (Chapter 16) adopts or rejects it, since its own proposed formal closure is the same contract discharged at the far end of the book, and The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13) may also rule, since the viewpoint is its severest case. The Ending (Chapter 16) adopts it at the scale of a book, as the contract its formal closure discharges, and The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13) adopts it for viewpoint plurality.
Must every contract be discharged at once?
No. A contract may be opened on page one by a single cue and honoured over the first chapter, and the stakes contract in particular is usually opened by a small question and honoured when the real problem arrives pages later. Deferral is legitimate when it is chosen: Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) defers character behind a general proposition, as “Worked Analyses” shows. The question to ask of an absence is whether it is deliberate and whether the reader has been given a reason to tolerate it. The contracts are the same for every book; how they are weighted is a choice informed by genre.
See also: the Reference contracts, with each contract’s components, more illustrations and a summary table of carriers and failures.