Aftermath — Everything between the climax and the last word. This chapter’s neutral term, preferred to denouement because it presupposes no shape. §2.3.1.
Anagnorisis — Aristotle’s recognition: a change from ignorance to knowledge. At an ending, the mechanism by which existing information is reorganised rather than new information supplied. §3.3, §6.2.
Arrested ending — A close that stops mid-action, before the outcome. Strategy 12 at §6.4.
Attention tax — Chapter 14’s term for the page space a subplot charges the reader. The ending is where the refund is due; §7.1, test 6.
Circularity — Closure by returning to the beginning’s language, image or situation. Torgovnick’s category; strategy 1 at §6.4.
Climax — The last major confrontation or disaster; the peak of conflict. A part of the ending, not a synonym for it. §2.3.1.
Closural allusion — Herrnstein Smith’s term for a final reference to something itself terminal — death, sleep, night, departure — which lends the close a borrowed finality. §3.2.
Closural strategy — A named shape an ending can take, with characteristic purchases and costs. Sixteen are tabulated at §6.4.
Closure — The reader’s felt sense that the book has arrived rather than stopped. Distinct from resolution, and separable from it in both directions. §2.3.2.
Coda — A short final movement in a changed key, continuous with the narrative. Distinguished from an epilogue, which is displaced. §2.4.
Congruence — Torgovnick’s criterion: whether an ending emerges from the novel’s own logic or is imposed on it from outside. §3.5, §8.12.
Denouement — The untying; the classical aftermath, with the implication that entangled facts are being separated. §2.4.
Desis and lusis — Aristotle’s tying and unravelling. The division falls at the turning point, which makes the aftermath structurally half the work rather than an appendix. §3.3, §6.6.
Domain (of an ending) — A register in which an ending does work: plot resolution, character-arc completion, thematic closure, emotional catharsis, the final image, and — proposed here — formal closure. §4.
Double ending — Two endings supplied, or the choice between them exhibited. Strategy 15 at §6.4.
Earned — Of an ending: resting only on material the book already deposited (Claim 1), and answering a pressure the book built (Claim 2). §6.1.
Ending — The final unit of a novel, distinguished by having no subsequent scene to correct it and by being the material through which the reader retroactively re-reads the whole. Comprises climax and aftermath. §2.1.
Fictions of concord — Kermode’s term for the imagined shapes by which we give an undifferentiated middle a beginning and an end. §3.1.
Final image — The literal last thing the book shows, considered as a domain rather than a decoration. §4.5.
Formal closure — This chapter’s proposed sixth domain: the completion, modification or disruption of the book’s own structural pattern, as distinct from its story. Closes the formal contract of Chapter 9 §4.6. §4.6.
Imposed ending — An ending congruent with something other than the book: a convention, a publisher, a readership, an author’s fatigue. §8.12.
Inevitability (retrospective) — The reader’s post-hoc sense that the ending could not have been otherwise. Independent of predictability. §6.2.
Narratable, the — D. A. Miller’s term for the instability, deviance and desire from which narrative arises and which closure eliminates. §3.9.
Peak–end rule — Kahneman and colleagues’ finding that retrospective evaluation of a brief affective episode is dominated by its most intense moment and its final moment. Reported here with its limits: the extension to novel-length experience is an analogy, not a finding. §3.6.
Plant audit — The whole-book test: trace every element the ending relies on back to its planting. §7.1, test 2; performed at §9.10.4.
Privileged position — Rabinowitz’s term for locations a reader automatically treats as significant. The last sentence is among the strongest. §3.6.
Proleptic close — An ending that narrates the future beyond the action. Strategy 8 at §6.4.
Proportion problem — The question of how much aftermath a book requires; the site of §8.2 and §8.3, which are opposite errors. §6.6.
Recency effect — The better recall of items at the end of a sequence; the counterpart to primacy. Robust for lists, and applied to novels only as a general claim about the privilege of boundary positions. §3.6.
Refused ending — A text that declines to conclude and marks the refusal. Strategy 16 at §6.4.
Resolution — The answering, or legible declining, of the plot’s dramatic questions. A domain, not the ending. §2.3.2, §4.1.
Retroactive lens — This chapter’s first principle: the ending is the position from which the whole book first becomes available as a whole, and the reader’s final interpretation is performed upon everything, not only the last pages. §1.1, §3.10.
Retrospection, anticipation of — Brooks’s term for the reader’s forward motion in expectation of a moment from which the whole will be legible. §3.4.
Retrospective reframe — A late disclosure that changes what the whole book was. Strategy 13 at §6.4; §8.10.
Series hook — A deliberate non-closure creating appetite for a further volume; called the sequel hook in the first edition (this edition keeps sequel for Chapter 2’s sense). §8.11.
Tangent — Closure by swerving to something apparently unrelated. Torgovnick’s category; strategy 3 at §6.4.
Terminal modification — Herrnstein Smith’s device: a pattern established across the text is altered at its final instance, which signals that it will not continue. §3.2, §4.6.
Termination — Simply stopping. Herrnstein Smith’s contrast term for what closure is not. §3.2, §7.1 test 7.
Tick-tock — Kermode’s minimal model of plot: the listener supplies a beginning and an end to an undifferentiated series, and the interval between them becomes a duration with a shape. §3.1.