Annotated, grouped by what each source is good for. Starred items are the recommended first three.
15.1 On endings specifically
- ★ Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending (1967). The indispensable book, and short. Read it for the tick-tock, for the argument that we hold our concord fictions sceptically, and for the deepest available account of why the demand for endings survives knowing that endings are imposed. The literary examples date; the argument does not.
- ★ Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure (1968). The most precise formal analysis of closure in the language. It is about poems, which is why it works: closural mechanisms are visible in ten lines and invisible in four hundred pages. Every device in §3.2 and §4.5 is hers.
- ★ Torgovnick, Marianna. Closure in the Novel (1981). The standard monograph, and the only one that offers a working typology of novelistic closes. Read for the congruence criterion and for the overt/covert distinction, both of which are directly usable in revision.
- Miller, D. A. Narrative and Its Discontents (1981). The essential complication. Difficult, and worth it: the concept of the narratable will change how a reader experiences last chapters, and not always comfortably. Chapters on Austen, Eliot and Stendhal.
- DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Writing Beyond the Ending (1985). The politics of closure. The historical argument — that a female protagonist’s plot could conclude in marriage or death and effectively nowhere else — is demonstrated rather than asserted, and the account of twentieth-century strategies for escaping it is the practical half.
- Carroll, Noël. “Narrative Closure.” Philosophical Studies 135 (2007). A short analytic-philosophy treatment arguing that closure is the answering of the questions a narrative has raised. Useful as a rigorous statement of the position this chapter’s §2.3.2 complicates.
15.2 On plot, desire and the shape of the whole
- Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot (1984). The dynamic account of narrative: plot as force rather than shape. The opening chapters and the essay on Freud’s masterplot are the relevant ones; the Freudian reading is contestable and the concept of the anticipation of retrospection is not.
- Aristotle. Poetics. Forty pages. The desis/lusis distinction, necessity or probability, peripeteia and anagnorisis, and the objection to the machine — four of this chapter’s load-bearing ideas, in a text a student can read in an evening.
- Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse (1980). For the amorce and for the vocabulary of prolepsis, which is what §6.4’s proleptic close actually is.
- Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse (1978). For kernels and satellites, the vocabulary in which §7.1’s proportion test is best stated.
15.3 On the reader
- Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading (1987). The rules of notice, and the reason the last sentence of a novel is read as a statement about the novel. Underread and immediately practical.
- Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993). Transportation, and — relevant here — the psychology of leaving a narrative world as well as entering one.
- Genette, Gérard. Paratexts (1997). For appendices, afterwords and notes considered as thresholds. The systematic background to §4.6’s apparatus carrier.
15.4 Cognitive and empirical work, used carefully
- Kahneman et al. (1993); Redelmeier and Kahneman (1996). The peak–end studies. Read the originals rather than the popularisations, and note the duration and modality of the episodes studied. §3.6 explains why the extension to novels is an analogy.
- Murdock (1962). The serial position curve. A one-page result worth seeing in its original form, so that its distance from literary reading is visible.
15.5 On the Great Expectations case
- Rosenberg, Edgar, ed. Great Expectations, Norton Critical Edition. The textual history, both endings, the relevant correspondence, and a selection of the critical dispute. The single best classroom resource on this chapter’s subject.
- Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens (1872–74). Where the cancelled ending survives, and where Dickens’s own account of the change is recorded.
15.6 Craft literature, used critically
- James, Henry. The Art of the Novel (1934). The prefaces. Read the Roderick Hudson preface for the circle drawn by a geometry of one’s own; James’s essay “The Art of Fiction” (1884) contains the indictment of the distribution of prizes and babies. The best practitioner’s writing on this subject and not superseded.
- Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (1927). Chatty, dated, and containing the sharpest joke in the field about death and marriage. The chapters on plot and on pattern are the relevant ones.
15.7 Within this textbook
This chapter draws on, and completes, the following:
- Chapter 1 (The Purposes of a Scene) — the value shift, which is what an ending is at the level of the scene; the domain model’s original form.
- Chapter 2 (Scene and Sequel) — the causal chain, which is the earned test at the scale of the beat; and the sequel structure, which §2.3.1 applies to the aftermath of a whole novel.
- Chapter 3 (The Dialogue Exchange) — text and subtext; the doorway exchange against which §9.10’s silence is measured.
- Chapter 4 (The Descriptive Detail) — denotation and connotation; the object economy on which every closural plant depends.
- Chapter 5 (The Transition) — the orientation budget, and the hard cut that delivered the reader to the ledger.
- Chapter 6 (The Chapter Break) — proposition and payoff, which is the plant audit’s other half; and the temporary stopping place, of which the ending is the permanent one.
- Chapter 13 (The Viewpoint Shift) — the empathy budget, which determines what catharsis an ending can spend; and the bounded chapter that is this book’s climax.
- Chapter 7 (Backstory and Flashback) — the interest deficit, which is the mechanism of §8.3.
- Chapter 14 (The Subplot) — the attention tax, which supplies §7.1’s proportion test; kernel and satellite.
- Chapter 9 (The Opening Pages) — the formal inverse. Its §3.2 states the symmetry; its §4.6’s formal contract is closed by this chapter’s §4.6.
- Chapter 10 (The Prologue) — closing the distance; the held note that lands here; and the false-advertising failure of which §8.4 is the exit version.