Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

20.3 The narrative arc: from lack to resolution
Unit 20 Narrative
Section 5 Narrative

Narratives are typically about change. We can think of a change like this:

situation A

changes to

situation B

The changes are often brought about by human actions, and the notion that actions are causes that have effects is an important part of many narratives. Often in a narrative the changes that take place - particularly the important ones - can be understood in terms of situation A being a lack or disruption, which is restored or resolved by situation B. So we can think of many narratives as having arcs like this:

The lack may occur when a family member leaves home; this lack may be restored when a family is reunited at the end (it need not be exactly the same people; the crucial point is that a lacking family is replaced by a restored family). Or the lack may be the theft of an object, which is hunted and finally recovered. The lack may be a personal lack; the hero or heroine may begin in ignorance and end in wisdom, or begin in isolation and end in community. There are many other variations on the pattern of lack and restoration, and the movement from one to the other is often the driving force of a narrative.

One very important aspect related to the unity and coherence of a narrative is its achievement of ’closure’. Closure is the ’tying up’ of the narrative, whereby loose ends are dealt with, problems solved and questions answered. The restoration of a lack is a form of closure. Few narratives are completely without closure (if they are, we think of them as experimental or avant-garde), though, because most narratives involve plenty of lacks and plenty of restorations, there is typically some lack of closure - a few issues (though not usually central ones) may not be resolved. Sometimes the narrative ends with closure but at the very end of the text a new lack may open up again; the text in its conclusion opens up a new narrative (perhaps leading to a new text - a sequel - that will bring closure to the lack that begins the new narrative). The existence or non-existence of closure often reveals a moral or ideological position. For example, if a narrative can be closed by the major male and female characters getting married, the narrative potentially carries a message about the virtues of marriage. Along similar lines, we could look at what constitutes or causes a ’lack’ or a disruption in the terms of a particular narrative: if the absence of the father at the beginning of a film constitutes its initial lack, then the narrative can be read to mean that nuclear families should stay together.

We can exemplify some of these points by looking at some aspects of the narrative of N. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn (1966), about a young American Indian man after the Second World War and his relationship with his culture; as in many narratives, the novel is concerned with an interior change in the hero from lack to fulfilment (in this case the change is emphasized by the fact that the narrative is constructed to parallel an all-night healing ceremony). The novel is divided up into a one-page prologue and four numbered sections. The prologue is echoed in the last page of the novel in that both parts describe a runner (the hero); they are somewhat distinct from the development of events in the narrative, and we could call one the ’orientation’ and the other the ’coda’ (see next section). After the orientation, the narrative begins with the return home of the hero from the war; we can interpret this as an inversion of the common opening in which the hero leaves home. Normally leaving home is seen as disruptive, but in this novel the hero is unable to fit into the home that he returns to, and so his return is the creation of a lack or a disruption. At the end of the novel, the hero walks out of the village, so providing a mirror-image of the beginning. However, he is now integrated into the culture. In the prologue (the orientation) he runs alone; at the end he runs with others. These lacks and closures are to do with movement between the village and the surrounding landscape (a culture-nature opposition: see Unit 18, Parallelism); the closure of the novel involves the unifying of the two, a unity expressed in the title House Made of Dawn.