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

20.4 How narratives begin and end
Unit 20 Narrative
Section 5 Narrative

We have looked at ways in which narrative form is a management of the narrative content it represents. We now consider some of the ways in which the narrative form is a response to the context of narration, and in particular how narratives are started and finished. We can call the movement from lack to resolution the ’narrative proper’. The text of the narrative may begin before the lack is revealed, and may end some time after the lack is resolved. This extra material functions to lead into and out of the narrative proper. The hearer or reader must enter into a narrative, and must then exit from the narrative at the end, and there are characteristic strategies for achieving this entry and exit; we first consider some ’entry strategies’ and then some ’exit strategies’.

Entry strategies include the title of the narrative and material quoted from elsewhere (an epigraph); these may function to set the leading idea of the narrative - the single notion that gives the narrative coherence. There may occasionally be an initial ’abstract’, which is a summary of what is to come. Very often, the text begins by setting the scene; this is called the ’orientation’ of the narrative, and may include a representation of the place where the narrative is to take place and perhaps some initial details about the characters. Orientations can be stereotyped; fairy tales may begin with a stereotyped orientation ’Once upon a time there was . . .’, and many films begin with the camera travelling over a city towards a particular locality.

Exit strategies are ways of ending the text once the lack has been resolved. This material is generally called the ’coda’; it can contain elements that mirror the ’abstract’ (e.g. a final summary) or the ’orientation’ (by describing some kind of departure from the scene). It can also be stereotyped, as in the fairy-tale coda ’And they all lived happily ever after . . .’. Codas sometimes fill a historical gap between an explicitly historical narrative content and now, the time of narrating and reading/hearing; thus a film might end by telling us what happened to various characters between the end of the narrative proper and now.