Five strands of theory explain why a separated opening is held to a stricter standard than an ordinary one. Each answers a question a writer meets in revision, and each is used by the tests.
Why does a reader treat a prologue as both skippable and significant?
Gérard Genette’s Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1987; translated by Jane E. Lewin, 1997) studies the paratext: everything that surrounds a text and mediates its reception, from titles and dedications to epigraphs, notes and prefaces. Genette’s image is a threshold, a vestibule where the reader may step in or turn back, and his preface is discourse about the text that follows, the most easily skipped zone of a book. A novelistic prologue rarely fits that account. It is not commentary on the book but the book itself, beginning earlier and elsewhere: a man counting a till, a ship in Arctic ice. It sits on a boundary Genette’s system does not quite accommodate, typographically part of the apparatus and in substance part of the storyworld. This chapter calls it a diegetic threshold, from diegesis, the narratologist’s word (Greek for “narration”) for the world a story tells: a piece of the story wearing the apparatus’s costume. The reader extends to it the apparatus’s licence to skip and the narrative’s demand for meaning, which is why craft advice about prologues contradicts itself. Advice from the apparatus side says keep it short, since readers skip it; advice from the story side says it must be a real scene with a real want. Each is right about its half.
The demand for meaning has a second source. Peter Rabinowitz’s Before Reading (1987) describes the rules of notice, conventions that tell a reader which parts of a text to treat as significant, the strongest of which concern privileged position: titles, first and last sentences and the openings and closes of chapters carry weight automatically. A prologue is privileged twice, as the beginning of the book and as a bounded unit with its own first and last sentences. Every detail in it is read as a promise, and a detail never redeemed costs more there than on page 100, where it would pass as texture.
Why does a prologue that shows the end change the whole book?
Meir Sternberg’s Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (1978) treats exposition, the antecedents a reader needs, as a problem of distribution, and the prologue is the limit case of delivering them all in advance. His more useful distinction is between suspense, uncertainty about what will happen, and curiosity, uncertainty about what has happened. A prolepsis (Greek for “anticipation”), the telling of a later event before an earlier one, shifts the balance: a prologue that shows the house burning reduces suspense about whether it burns and creates curiosity about how and why, so that the whole main narrative becomes an approach to a known destination. A book whose pleasures lie in causes gains from that trade, and a book whose pleasures lie in outcomes is damaged by it.
Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) explains why the trade also buys patience. People make sense of time through fictions of concord, structures in which a middle is intelligible because it lies between a beginning and an end that belong together. A prologue that frames an ending promises concord in advance, and a reader who has been shown the destination will tolerate a slower approach. The promise binds, however: a book that installs a frame and never completes it has broken a commitment the reader was given no reason to doubt.
Why does a mis-pitched prologue damage the pages after it?
Solomon Asch’s experiments on impression formation (1946) found that the same information in a different order produces different judgements, because earlier items govern how later ones are read. Menakhem Perry’s “Literary Dynamics” (1979) carried the finding into reading as the primacy effect: readers build a hypothesis from the first material and fit later material to it, resisting revision. A prologue is the first material, and the frame it installs is the frame through which Chapter One is read. A prologue that promises a thriller makes a quiet family novel read for its first hundred pages as a thriller that has stalled.
Why does a prologue fade, and what keeps it alive?
Catherine Emmott’s Narrative Comprehension (1997) describes readers as building a contextual frame for each situation, a running representation that binds characters to a place and a time, and as keeping one frame primed while others lie dormant. Returning to a dormant frame requires the reader to reinstate it, and this chapter calls the effort the reinstatement cost. A prologue’s frame is built in a few pages and suspended at once, so it is the thinnest frame in the book and the one held longest. Applying Emmott’s model to prologues is this chapter’s inference, not her finding, but it predicts what readers describe: a prologue first recalled near the end of a book costs more than one touched at intervals, and some readers turn back to reread it at the moment it matters, which is the cost made visible. The Mechanism draws the practical conclusion.
How old is the suspicion of prologues?
The form is older than the novel. Aristotle’s Poetics defines the tragic prologue by position, as everything before the chorus enters, and Euripides filled it with a speaker who set out the antecedents directly. The sonnet before Romeo and Juliet gives away the ending; the Chorus of Henry V instructs the audience how to watch; the eighteenth-century novel opened with editors vouching for found papers; and the genre prologue of fantasy and the thriller became standard in the second half of the twentieth century. The hostility a contemporary writer meets is recent, Anglo-American and largely commercial. Its likely causes are institutional: agents and editors who decide on a submission within its first pages, as Noah Lukeman reports in The First Five Pages (2000); a sample of three chapters, of which a prologue uses part; and genre prologues so uniform that the label predicted the contents. That “readers skip prologues” is repeated far more often than it is measured, and this chapter knows of no survey that settles how many do. The pressures are real, and a writer who submits a prologue pays a tax she should know about. They are not a theory of narrative, and the Coda keeps the two apart.
See also: the Reference theory, with Genette’s three variables, the accessus of the medieval schoolroom, the eighteenth century’s editorial fictions, Said on origin and beginning, and the history tabulated by period.