Riku Sayujâ€™s review of The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction

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The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
by

Frank Kermode

Riku Sayuj's review

Mar 14, 2012

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bookshelves: to-be-reviewed-soon, writing-related, books-about-books, lit-crit

Early in this work, Kermode discusses the differences between myth and fiction as he defines them, and the way that popular stories stick close to established conventions, while major works tend to vary them more and more.

'The story that proceeded very simply to its obviously predestined end, would be nearer myth than the novel or drama.'Â

This â€˜tragic reversalâ€�, is postulated to be important in 'sophisticated' fictions. Furthermore, it depends on our confidence of the end:

'it is a disconfirmation followed by a consonance; the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected or instructive route'.Â

***

'The more daring the peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of reality; and the more certainly we shall feel that the fiction under consideration is one of those which, by upsetting the ordinary balance of our naive expectations, is finding something out for us, something real. The falsification of an expectation can be terrible, as in the death of Cordelia; it is a way of finding something out that we should, on our more conventional way to the end, have closed our eyes to. Obviously it could not work if there were not a certain rigidity in the set of our expectations.'

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