Three close readings of published reveals, a short screen reading and the household revision case. Each reading names the reveal’s object, position, withholder, alignment and range.
Ian McEwan, Atonement (2001): a closing reveal of telling
The novel’s first part, set on one hot day in 1935, follows thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis as she misreads a scene at a fountain between her sister Cecilia and Robbie Turner, reads a letter not meant for her, and accuses Robbie of a rape he did not commit. The second part follows Robbie in the retreat to Dunkirk in 1940; the third, Briony as a trainee nurse in London, who goes to Balham to find Cecilia and Robbie together and promises to undo her lie. The third part ends with initials and a place and date, BT London 1999. A last section, “London, 1999”, is narrated by Briony at seventy-seven, newly diagnosed with vascular dementia, who discloses that Robbie died of septicaemia at Bray Dunes in June 1940, that Cecilia was killed months later when a bomb destroyed Balham Underground station, that she never went to Balham, and that the novel the reader has read is hers.
The reveal’s object is the telling, and its range is the whole book. Most of that range is reinterpretation: every scene of 1935 stands as a description of what Briony, now the novelist, imagined the others felt, and passages that seemed the narration’s omniscient privilege, Robbie’s thoughts on the march, Cecilia’s at the fountain, become a guilty woman’s reconstruction of minds she wronged. One passage is falsified, the reunion in Balham, and the book survives the falsification because it meets the teller rule of The Taxonomy: the coda names the teller and gives her motive, a kindness she calls her atonement, granting the lovers in fiction the happiness she took from them in life.
The double reading was prepared from the first page. Briony is introduced as a child writer with a passion for order and a play she wants performed; Part Three gives her an editor’s letter, signed with initials, criticising a novella she has written about a girl watching a scene at a fountain; and the initials at the end of Part Three put a signature on the text before the coda explains it. The withholder is a teller with a motive, and the alignment is the reader learning alone, since no character in the coda learns anything. The reveal has no successor question and no consequence a character can act on, which is the exception given for test 6 (Consequence) in Diagnostic Tests: the impossibility of action is the book’s subject, because atonement by fiction is all that is left to its teller.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (2012): a turn reveal
Part One alternates two texts. Nick Dunne narrates, from the day his wife Amy disappears, the police search and his own growing exposure; Amy’s diary entries, beginning seven years earlier, trace a marriage in which she grows afraid of him. Part Two opens with Amy, on the day she vanished, alive and pleased: I’m so much happier now that I’m dead. The diary was written to frame her husband.
The reveal’s object is the telling again, but its range is half the book, because the teller rule confines it. The diary is falsified, and it can be, since the reveal names its author and her motive; Nick’s chapters are only reinterpreted, because his narration never stated a falsehood on the book’s authority. It did conceal: he had a young mistress, and he withheld her from the reader as from the police. But it flagged the concealment as it went, most memorably in It was my fifth lie to the police. I was just starting. The flag makes Nick a visible withholder, so that when his secret comes out the reader feels the book kept faith with her, which is the difference between a teller with a motive and paralipsis without a reason.
Positioned at the turn, the reveal answers what happened to Amy? and replaces it with a stronger successor, what will she do, and can Nick survive it? The alignment changes with it. For half a book the reader learned with Nick, or behind him; from Part Two she is ahead of every character but Amy, and the curiosity of a missing-wife mystery becomes the suspense of a contest between two people the reader now knows to be lying. The test of a turn reveal is whether the second half uses the new question, and Flynn’s does, by giving the reader both players’ moves.
Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (2013): the early reveal
Rosemary Cooke narrates as a student at the University of California, Davis, in the 1990s, and tells the reader that her father advised her to start in the middle. Her sister Fern disappeared from the family when Rosemary was five, and her brother Lowell left home after it. About a quarter of the way into the book (page 76 of one edition), Rosemary tells the reader what she has withheld: Fern was a chimpanzee, raised alongside her as a twin in a psychological experiment run by their father.
A more conventional book would have kept this for its end, as a surprise reveal of identity, and earned it by a double reading of every early description of Fern. Fowler spends it early and on purpose, and the withholder is a teller who says why she withheld: being raised with a chimpanzee defined her childhood, and it is, she says, never going to be the first thing she shares with someone. The delay is therefore characterisation rather than trickery, and the reader’s experience of the delay, having taken Fern for a girl, is the experience Rosemary has spent her adult life avoiding in others. The successor question is stronger than the one answered: not what was Fern? but what was done to her when she was taken away, and what her family did and failed to do. The early reveal trades a twist for a subject, and the trade is the book’s argument, that the line between the sisters was drawn by the people who studied them.
A screen reading: The Sixth Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999)
A child psychologist, Malcolm Crowe, is shot in his home by a former patient. Months later he takes on a frightened boy, Cole, who confides that he sees dead people, who walk around like regular people and do not know they are dead. Malcolm’s marriage seems to have cooled: his wife does not answer him at their anniversary dinner, and he cannot get into his basement office. At the end his wife, asleep, drops a ring from her hand, and Malcolm sees that it is his own: he died in the opening scene. A short sequence of earlier moments replays them under the second reading.
The reveal’s object is identity, and its range is the whole film, held by reinterpretation alone, as in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Nothing the camera showed is falsified, because the film was built so that no character but Cole speaks to Malcolm, and every scene of the marriage reads as estrangement forwards and as a ghost’s presence backwards. The withholder is a vantage that does not know, Malcolm’s, and the alignment is the viewer learning with him, which gives the recognition its force: the viewer’s change of understanding and his are one event. It has consequence, since Malcolm, knowing, speaks to his sleeping wife and lets her go. The replayed sequence is the film doing part of the viewer’s double reading, a concession to a medium in which the viewer cannot turn back the page.
The household revision case: the ledger at the convergence
The situation. The book’s largest reveal is in the ledger: that the father knew he was ill, wrote down the dates, a doctor’s name and a list of what needed doing, and told nobody. The canon keeps it from everyone until the end. Elena’s reading at the register drawer is interrupted before the illness entries; Dov takes the ledger home when he clears the drawer for the buyer; and Dov, the only person to hold the book in those months, writes forward and never reads back. The convergence follows Dov’s viewpoint chapter of the evening of 9 March, at about 78 per cent of the book: he brings the ledger to the shop, says “It’s all there. From March, it’s mine.”, Elena rings Nadia, and the three read it together, as Arc and Theme (Chapter 12) and The Ending (Chapter 16) have it.
Version A, the draft. The convergence in The Problem, in which Dov adds that he took the ledger home, read it, and knows their father was ill.
Diagnosis. The draft’s writer was answering test 3 (Withholder), and answered it by removing the withholder. Dov’s ignorance needed a reason; the draft gave him knowledge instead, and the book lost its recognition. Test 7 (Recognition) fails, since the truth is reported by a character who learned it offstage. Test 4 (Alignment) fails in a particular way: the illness was the one fact the reader, Elena, Nadia and Dov could learn together, and the draft has Dov learn it first, in a scene the book does not show, so that the reader receives it second-hand at the same moment as Elena. Test 6 (Consequence) is damaged as well. Arc and Theme’s arrangement (Chapter 12), three people reading one record, which is the book’s answer to its thematic question, becomes one person telling two, and the ending’s He had known. He had not told them repeats what the reader was told a few pages earlier.
Version B, the revision. Delete Dov’s four sentences, so that he says only “It’s all there. From March, it’s mine.”, and add two sentences to Dov’s chapter of 9 March, after he writes the date and the count:
He did not turn back the page, then or in any of the months after. In eleven years he had never read a page of it; the ledger was for writing in, and reading it back had been his father’s business, and he did not start now.
What the revision did. It gave the withholder a reason in the character, a deference that fits a son who thinks of the dead man as his father and who, in the same chapter, has decided that the ledger has a way of being written in. It put the reason where the reader can see it before the reveal, so that the delay is visible, and inside the one chapter the canon grants Dov’s mind, so that it costs no new viewpoint. And it gave Dov’s line at the convergence a double reading. Forwards, It’s all there is a confession of his own hand; backwards, the reader knows what Dov does not, that he has never read what is there. The disclosure map shows why the convergence can bear its load. The sisters receive three disclosures there, the looser hand, the sale and the illness; the reader holds two of them already, the sale from Dov’s thread at about 58 per cent and the hand from his chapter, so for her the scene carries one new fact, and the other two play as suspense about how the sisters will take them. The illness is the one disclosure in the book that reaches all four at once.
The double-reading table for the illness, in brief, shows the preparation the revision relies on.
| Position | Passage | First reading | Second reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Prologue | The till counted twice | A careful man’s habit | A man putting his accounts in order |
| Prologue | He could not have said in case of what | An impulse he cannot explain | A reason he could not say aloud |
| About 25% | His last entry stops halfway along its third line | An entry interrupted | An entry interrupted by what it records |
| About 66% | In case anyone ever needs to check, which Nadia took to mean the shop | A shopkeeper’s scruple | A record kept for this |
| About 78% | A doctor’s name that means nothing to Dov; he never reads back | A son’s grief and deference | Why the truth waited for all three |
| Convergence | It’s all there | Dov’s confession | He does not know what is there |
Every row has both readings. Nadia’s reading of the line in Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) is a decoy reading in the sense of The Mechanism: a character with a reason supplies the first reading, so that the reader’s error is hers. The mother’s reason for changing the locks has no row and no column with an entry. It is the book’s declined reveal, kept visible by Dov’s She said you’d ask that, and the revision leaves it so.
What the revision has not solved. The new sentences state Dov’s motive rather than dramatise it, and they lean on the narration’s retrospective gap, then or in any of the months after, which his chapter has already used once (he thought about it for years afterwards); a second use may read as the narration underlining. Placed beside the doctor’s name, they tell the reader that there are unread pages, which sharpens her curiosity enough that many readers will infer the illness at 78 per cent: the ending becomes a curiosity reveal with the reader half a step ahead, which is the design, and it costs surprise. The prologue’s he could not have said in case of what survives the double reading only if said means spoken aloud; a reader who takes it to mean known will find the narration claiming an ignorance the father did not have, the book’s nearest approach to a cheat, protected only partly by the conditional. And the convergence remains crowded for the sisters, though not for the reader, so its sequence must let Elena receive the hand before Nadia arrives for the reading.
See also: the full treatment, with readings of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Silent Patient and Knives Out, and the household’s double-reading table and disclosure map in full.