The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* 14. Narrative Negotiation */

2026-01-17T18:35:27Z

14. Narrative Negotiation

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	== 14. Narrative Negotiation ==		== 14. Narrative Negotiation ==

			* What gives energy to a narrative is the conflict that works itself out over the course of the story. The fuel for that energy is brought to the story in the form of our concerns as readers, concerns that are catalyzed by the conflict. In this way, narrative is a form of passionate thought. The greatest masterplots are narrativized over and over again because they engage conflicts that seem to be a permanent part of our circumstances as human beings.
			* Oedipus is a gripping masterplot, dealing with tough contradictions, that human beings have repeatedly used to think with in successive narrative renderings.
			** It is the struggle between this certain knowledge of how lives are determined and the need to assert a freedom and dignity that in some way overwrites this helplessness that is the larger conflict, riding on the agon contained in the story of Oedipus. His particular struggle against his fate catalyzes the general need to control what cannot be controlled.
			** Aristotle: The tragic fear and pity may be aroused by the Spectacle. His catharsis seems implicitly to refer to the arousal and purgation of powerful emotions that otherwise might control us.
			** Freud: The conflict between fate and the free exercise of human will is displaced by the conflict between desire and conscience or, in later Freudian terms, between the urging of the libido and the tyranny of the superego.
			** Propp: The tale does not arise as a direct reflection of a social order. it arises from a conflict, from the contradictions that occur as one order replaces another.
			** Levi-Strauss: Shifts the focus from a linear reading of myth that goes from beginning to end to a structural of synchronic reading that focuses on repetitions in the material. The overrating of blood relations is to the underrating of blood relationships as the attempt to escape autochthony is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although the Freudian problem has ceased to be that of autochthony versus bisexual reproduction, it is still the problem of understanding how one can be born of two: How is it that we do not have only one procreator, but a mother plus a father? Therefore, not only Sophocles, but Freud himself, should be included among the recorded versions of the Oedipus myth on a par with earlier or seemingly more "authentic" versions.
			* I am not saying that we necessarily find in narratives successful negotiations of differences. But we are moved by the narrative, drawn into it, and become alert to how these conflicts play out. And this, I am arguing, is an important form of thinking, whether or not the negotiation of conflicts is seen to be successful. Moreover, in contrast to more abstract modes of thought, this is passionate thinking.
			* Closure becomes important in this discussion because, at the level of questions, it is the end of narrative conflict. If closure of the conflict or agon coincides with closure at the level of questions, it gives the impression of resolving larger issues that are carried by the agon.
			* In Barthes "writerly" text and in deconstruction, closure at the level of questions never arrives, regardless of the text. We now have a persistent suspicion of closure at the level of questions, even in the simplest, most apparently readable, texts.
			* Miller and others would argue that an awareness of the necessary openness of narrative, its lack of closure, far from being morally nihilistic, is the basis of any "ethics of reading". It is ethical because it not only rests in an acknowledgment of the nature of all communication - its semantic porosity - but it also prevents the appropriation of a text to one monolithic meaning. It liberates readers to exercise their creative reading power in response to the full potentiality of narrative.
			* Is the attitude of detached questioning something that functions to protect readers and viewers from the power that narrative has to move us with deep feeling?
			* If validity in reading or viewing or hearing narrative depends upon maintaining in our minds opposed moral ideas in a kind of balance, does this work against the creation and maintenance of strong convictions? And by indirection does this work against the capacity for decisive moral behavior?
			* If our thinking is saturated with the many languages of narrative from our earliest years, what is it that leaks in from the unmediated world of feelings, actions, and consequences? Where does the balance lie between the world at large and our constructions of it?
			* Stanley Fish distinguishes between:
			** A rhetorical text that "satisfies the needs of its readers" by mirroring "the opinions its readers already hold" and
			** A dialectical text that "is disturbing, for it requires of its readers a searching and rigorous scrutiny of everything they believe in and live by."

Robert.adlington: /* 13. Narrative Contestation */

2026-01-17T18:02:43Z

13. Narrative Contestation

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	== 13. Narrative Contestation ==		== 13. Narrative Contestation ==

			* Lizzie Borden's story is not really one story but rather a contest of stories played out in a contest of narratives. Here the agon is itself a conflict of narratives. Prosecution and defense are the antagonists and protagonists who, in their turn, operate like authors, challenged to narrate their stories so effectively that they win credence from their audience, which is either a judge or jury.
			* A trial can be described as a huge, unpolished narrative compendium featuring the contest of two sets of authors, each trying to make their central narrative of events prevail by spinning narrative segments for their rhetorical impact. They fight this out in a tug of war in which the many discrete parts of their two narratives are alternately constructed and deconstructed as they work toward their final summations. As such, a trial is an immensely complicated narrative structure.
			* Under US law, the heavier narrative task is placed on the prosecution, who must not simply tell a story, but tell one that is complete. It must have a central figure, fully equipped "beyond a reasonable doubt" with the motivation, opportunity, means and capability to commit the crime - that is, to engage in a complete action with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
			* Reading narrative is a matter of filling in gaps. A shadow story is a story in which the gaps in the narrative are so great as to prevent the story from achieving some genera reader satisfaction that it is complete.
			* The most challenging gap that we are called upon to fill in a narrative of criminal law is motive.
			* The problem in criminal law of establishing motivation and the requisite personality for the deed makes the deployment of masterplots especially important. Used to invoke types, they can be powerful rhetorical tools when activated. They can absorb the complexity of a defendant's human nature into the simplicity of type.
			* In non-fiction narrative, as a trial purports to be, the ultimate form of inexplicable motivation is madness.
			* Given how thoroughly narrative forms saturate our thinking about the world, it would seem logical that stories of the disempowered would be excellent instruments of cultural transformation. See, for example, Critical Legal Studies and Critical Race Theory.
			* In less regulated forms, narratives are in combat in most compartments of life, public and private: academic debate, scientific theoretical work, political contests, commercial advertising, and when neighbors quarrel, friends fall out, family members recall their grudges, or lovers recriminate, it is almost invariably a matter of people trying somehow to certify their narrative version of events against competing versions.
			* Any well-written narrative holds us because there is a plurality of possible stories lying ahead of us as we read. In our minds, these stories jostle with each other. This is a good working definition of suspense.

	== 14. Narrative Negotiation ==		== 14. Narrative Negotiation ==

Robert.adlington: /* 12. Narrative Worlds */

2026-01-17T11:42:51Z

12. Narrative Worlds

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 == 12. Narrative Worlds ==
 == 13. Narrative Contestation ==
 == 14. Narrative Negotiation ==

Robert.adlington: /* 11. Narrative and Truth */

2026-01-17T09:54:35Z

11. Narrative and Truth

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	== 11. Narrative and Truth ==		== 11. Narrative and Truth ==

			* What most audiences expect in historical narrative is not the truth but the intent to tell the truth. Nonfiction narratives are, in some sense, falsifiable.
			* Fiction, by contrast, is not falsifiable because the story it tells is neither true nor false.
			* Unless we are told otherwise, we assume that the fictional world in the narrative is a simulacrum of the world we actually live in, and this assumption is one of the ways we fill many of the gaps of narrative.
			* We will bring our own understanding of history into a historical (or fictional) narrative. Our ideas may be correct or incorrect or just plain nuts; our feelings may be justified or unjustified; but they are, nonetheless, important features of our "own experiential reality", and they can flood the gaps in the narrative.
			* Genres are freighted with subcultural ideas on subjects like gender, what is knowable, the chance of happiness, freedom of choice, the existence or nonexistence of Bod. In this view, narrative fiction spends much more time confirming our illusions than opening us up to new knowledge.
			* Facts don't speak for themselves. They must be interpreted. And interpreting facts as they proceed in time requires turning them into a story. You could say that history does not really happen in the past but must wait until some narrativizes the past.
			* The fruit of our experience enters into our judgment of narrative fictions. There may be, for example, something like this sense of what constitutes wisdom when one says of a novel that it is "too sentimental".
			* In the game of fiction, another world is created. It can look a lot like our own or it can look utterly different. But most fictional worlds, even the bizarre ones, are just like our own in this: that within their borders they also maintain the distinction between the factual, the false, and the fictional. Accordingly, characters in these fictional worlds can get things right or get them wrong. They do so according to the facts not of our world, but of theirs. What makes this even more wonderful is that we understand it so easily. Making fictional worlds is a gift most of us acquire as early as we acquire the gift of narrative. It allows us not only to play in another world but also to use it to think meaningfully about our own world, without ever confusing the two worlds. Indeed, to confuse them is to fall victim to a pathology.

	== 12. Narrative Worlds ==		== 12. Narrative Worlds ==

Robert.adlington: /* 10. Character and Self in Narrative */

2026-01-17T09:43:01Z

10. Character and Self in Narrative

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	== 10. Character and Self in Narrative ==		== 10. Character and Self in Narrative ==

			* It is only though narrative that we know ourselves as active entities that operate through time.
			* Characters have agency. As they drive the action, they necessarily reveal who they are in terms of their motives, their strength, weakness, trustworthiness, capacity to love, hate, cherish, adore, deplore, and so on. By their actions do we know them.
			* Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative's most challenging gaps.
			* External causes are usually easy to spot; it is the causative chemistry inside that is hard to figure. We cannot see inside character. We must infer.
			* EM Forster distinguishes between flat characters (with no hidden complexity) and round characters, who have varying degrees of depth and complexity and "cannot be summed up in a single phrase"
			* In Sartre's Nausea, Roquentin is unable to integrate the contradictory aspects of Rollebon's reported behavior in the biography he is writing. There is no character there, just a chaos of unreconcilable actions. Sartre argued that this is the condition that we all find ourselves in when we think honestly, or at least clearly, about ourselves and others. Character, for him, is an idea imposed on human beings.
			* All cultures and subcultures have numerous types that circulate through all the various narrative modes. When applied to real people, types appear to flatten them or deny them their full humanity, but do we know how to think about people in a type-free way? It is very hard to exclude types in representing the human.
			* Characterization by type can accommodate a great deal of human complexity, especially when the character is a synthesis of multiple types.
			* Autobiography can be a matter of collecting or re-collecting from memory those crucial events in the story of one's life that conform to a particular masterplot and that allow you to fulfill the requirements of the type at the center of the story.
			* Readers will underread and overread, they will find types where none were intended.
			* Reading with an eye out for a text's performative status frequently involves passing back and forth between intentional and symptomatic modes of interpreting.

	== 11. Narrative and Truth ==		== 11. Narrative and Truth ==

Robert.adlington: /* 9. Interpretation Across Media */

2026-01-16T16:51:32Z

9. Interpretation Across Media

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	** Authors who are read symptomatically are frequently conceived of as fractured - split between what they intend (through the implied author) and what they reveal.		** Authors who are read symptomatically are frequently conceived of as fractured - split between what they intend (through the implied author) and what they reveal.
	** Though they seem to be opposite ways of interpreting narrative, both intentional and symptomatic approaches are oriented toward a meaning that is presumed to lie behind the narrative.		** Though they seem to be opposite ways of interpreting narrative, both intentional and symptomatic approaches are oriented toward a meaning that is presumed to lie behind the narrative.
			** A great deal (but not all) of Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic criticism involves varying forms of symptomatic interpretation.
	* Adaptive Readings - All interpretation involves some level of creativity in the sense that we are all active collaborators in making meaning out of narrative.		* Adaptive Readings - All interpretation involves some level of creativity in the sense that we are all active collaborators in making meaning out of narrative.
	** In reading or viewing or listening to any narrative, we are at once taking in and adding, tracing, and shaping. There is a continuum here, and at a certain point we find that what we call interpretation is looking more and more like what we call creation. And yet interpretation is still present, even if it is flagrant misinterpretation.		** In reading or viewing or listening to any narrative, we are at once taking in and adding, tracing, and shaping. There is a continuum here, and at a certain point we find that what we call interpretation is looking more and more like what we call creation. And yet interpretation is still present, even if it is flagrant misinterpretation.
	** Bloom: all great works of art are necessarily powerful misreadings of great works of art that precede them.		** Bloom: all great works of art are necessarily powerful misreadings of great works of art that precede them.
	** To tell a story is to try to understand it.		** To tell a story is to try to understand it.
	** A great deal (but not all) of Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic criticism involves varying forms of symptomatic interpretation.
	*

	== 9. Interpretation Across Media ==		== 9. Interpretation Across Media ==

			* Adapters, if they are at all good, are raiders; they don't copy, they steal what they want and leave the rest.
			* Dudley Andrew distinguishes between:
			** Borrowing - Intertextuality, the kind of casual appropriation of stories, ideas, situations that would appear to be inevitable in any creative act.
			** Intersecting - Trying to stick as close as possible to the original using the new medium (eg book to film)
			** Transforming - Use the full power of the new medium both to remain faithful to the original and at the same time to make a full transformation of it in the new medium.
			* Novel readers tolerate a great deal of material unrelated or only peripherally related to the story line, while films tend to strip out this extraneous stuff and focus on the story's constitutive events.
			* Retardation is one of the great pleasures of narrative. It allows us to settle in and think about what we are taking in; it also can play a key role in the development of suspense.
			* When reading about a character in a novel, we draw upon pre-existing types that we have absorbed from our culture and out of which, guided by the narrative, we mentally synthesize the character or something that stands for it.
			* Culture constrains all narrative. Audiences set limits on what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, and by their response they select which narratives get repeated and which fall away. Nevertheless, departures from cultural norms catch on and enter a culture's narrative pool. How this happens is as mysterious as it is exciting. But as culturally transgressive fads catch on they become in their turn cultural (or subcultural) norms.

	== 10. Character and Self in Narrative ==		== 10. Character and Self in Narrative ==

Robert.adlington: /* 8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative */

2026-01-15T16:20:59Z

8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative

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	== 8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative ==		== 8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative ==

			* Some would argue that, far from being whole, all narratives are necessarily incomplete, fractured, and even self-contradictory.
			* Intertextuality (from Kristeva) - Narratives have no borders but are part of an immense, unfolding (and hence ever-changing) tapestry.
			* Intentional Readings - The ideas and judgements that we infer from the narrative are understood to be in keeping with a sensibility that intended these effects.
			** Narrative is one way of creating order out of chaos
			* Symptomatic Readings - Yours is an interpretation that the implied author would not agree with, but you are also maintaining that this is what is psychologically and culturally significant about the novel. The fact that the author may not agree with your reading, that he may in fact be shocked by it, could itself be taken as support for your position.
			** A deconstructive reading deconstructs the intentional reading to find in back of it a reading that the author had no conscious intention of constructing.
			** Authors who are read symptomatically are frequently conceived of as fractured - split between what they intend (through the implied author) and what they reveal.
			** Though they seem to be opposite ways of interpreting narrative, both intentional and symptomatic approaches are oriented toward a meaning that is presumed to lie behind the narrative.
			* Adaptive Readings - All interpretation involves some level of creativity in the sense that we are all active collaborators in making meaning out of narrative.
			** In reading or viewing or listening to any narrative, we are at once taking in and adding, tracing, and shaping. There is a continuum here, and at a certain point we find that what we call interpretation is looking more and more like what we call creation. And yet interpretation is still present, even if it is flagrant misinterpretation.
			** Bloom: all great works of art are necessarily powerful misreadings of great works of art that precede them.
			** To tell a story is to try to understand it.
			** A great deal (but not all) of Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic criticism involves varying forms of symptomatic interpretation.
			*

	== 9. Interpretation Across Media ==		== 9. Interpretation Across Media ==

Robert.adlington: /* 7. Interpreting Narrative */

2026-01-15T15:23:44Z

7. Interpreting Narrative

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	== 7. Interpreting Narrative ==		== 7. Interpreting Narrative ==

			* Judgement, in the sense that we are using it, is an attunement of feeling to its object.
			* Readers and audiences are often trying to locate a sensibility behind the narrative that accounts for it is is constructed - a sensibility on which to base their interpretations.
			* An implied author is that sensibility (that combination of feeling, intelligence, knowledge, and opinion) that "accounts for" the narrative. Insofar as we debate the intended meaning of a narrative, we root our positions in a version of the implied author that we infer from the text.
			* Underreading:
			** We are vulnerable to narrative texts - given their rhetorical resources they seem to manipulate us and in general to exercise a good deal of power over our lives. Throughout our lives we are prisoners of these cultural texts - they even do a lot of our thinking for us.
			** But we also exercise a power over texts. We do not simply absorb the information in the narrative discourse but, almost invariably, we overlook things that are there and put in things that are not there. We underread and we overread.
			** Kermode: "The history of interpretation may be thought of as the history of exclusions, which enable us to seize upon this issue rather than on some other as central, and choose from the remaining mass only what seems most compliant.
			** Even at a high degree of richness or sophistication, interpretation is a form of closure in that it is an assertion of meaning within which the text can be accommodated.
			** Musil, in The Man Without Qualities, went so far as to argue that narrative itself can be a kind of underreading insofar as it is rooted in the desire (and necessity) to underread the complexity of life: When one is overburdened and dreams of simplifying one's life, the basic law of this life, the law one yearns for, is nothing other than that of narrative order, the simple order that allows one so say: "First this happened and then that happened..." It is the simple sequence of events in which the overwhelmingly manifold nature of things is represented, in a unidimensional order, as a mathematician would say, stringing all that has occurred in space and time on a single thread, which calms us; that celebrated "thread of the story," which is, it seems, the thread of life itself.
			** In life we have to act. In order to act, we need to know (or at least think we know) what the story is. Our survival as a species has probably depended on our doing this with sufficient speed and efficiency to get done what we need to get done in order simply to stay alive.
			* Overreading - At the same time we overread, we find in narratives qualities, motives, moods, ideas, judgement, even events for which there is not direct evidence in the discourse.
			** Overreading is a phenomenon that is frequently cued by the masterplots in which our fears and desires are most engaged.
			** Our minds seem to abhor narrative vacuums. We try to fill them in.
			** Probably the most difficult thing about reading narratives is to remain in a state of uncertainty. If a narrative won't close by itself, one often tries to close it, even if it means shutting one's eyes to some of the details and imagining others that aren't there, underreading and overreading.
			** One way to define intentional interpretation is the effort to reduce both underreading and overreading to a minimum. It is a process perhaps best achieved by minds coming together in a mutual lending of perceptions.
			* Gaps - Narratives by their nature are riddled with gaps.
			** Cruxes - Important gaps which hide critical information. In criticism, a crux is an oft-debated element in a work that, depending on how we interpret it, can significantly effect how we interpret the work as a whole
			* Repetition - When you are having trouble interpreting, you can look for what is repeated:
			** Themes - Are abstract, and are implicit in motifs.
			** Motifs - Are concrete.
			** Eg, In Wuthering Heights, windows are motifs that support the themes of escape, exclusion, and imprisonment.
			* We have little clear understanding of what exactly the mind does when it reads.

	== 8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative ==		== 8. Three Ways to Interpret Narrative ==

Robert.adlington: /* 6. Narration */

2026-01-14T16:36:15Z

6. Narration

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	== 6. Narration ==		== 6. Narration ==

			* All narratives, however playful, carry meaning in the sense of ideas and judgements with them. Some narratives arrive at judgements - ie at closure on the level of intellectual and moral questions - and some don't.
			* Narrators - Can be variably reliable:
			** When you narrate, you construct, but constructing is not the same things as lying. Narrative is always a matter of selecting from a great arsenal of pre-existing devices and using them to synthesize our effects. One of these devices is the narrator.
			** Does the narrator narrate everything?
			*** Direct discourse/ direct thought - is when the narrator cites a character's own words/thoughts in quotation marks, and these could then be seen as outside the narration. Indirect discourse/thought dispense with the quotation marks and are clearly part of the narration.
			*** Some modernist narrators experimented with interior monologue, basically forms of "direct thought" but words are probably inadequate for representing thought accurately.
			* Voice - The two principle forms are first-person ("I woke up") and third-person ("He woke up"), though there are some experiments with second-person ("You woke up"). In second-person, is the reader really thrust in some way into the role of this unnamed protagonist or do we read it as someone talking to himself? Or do we get used to the strangeness and read it as virtual 3rd person?
			** Most third person is told by an external narrator situated outside of the world of the story, but there is often still the sense of a personality doing the narrating, processing the scene and presenting it to/for us.
			** There are many instances of 3rd person narration that are anything but omniscient.
			* Focalization - The lens through which we see characters and events in the narrative. Flaubert was an expert at blending external 3rd person narration with moments of focalization through certain characters.
			* Distance - Refers to the narrator's degree of involvement in the story she tells.
			** In order to create narratorial distance, Hemingway devised a narratorial voice that gives the impression of complete emotional noninvolvement in what it narrates.
			* Reliability - To what extent can we rely on the narrator to give us an accurate rendering of the facts?
			** In the case of unreliable narrators, narration itself - its difficulties, its liability to be subverted by one's own interests and prejudices and blindnesses - becomes part of the subject.
			** Some unreliable narrators can be trusted for the facts but not for their interpretation, and some can not even be trusted for the facts.
			** Getting to the implied author (the voice and opinions that we believe animate the story and the level of unreliability of the narrator) is one of the central challenges of interpretation.
			* Free indirect style - A fluid adaptation of the narrator's voice in a kind of ventriloquism of different voices, all done completely without the usual signposts of punctuation and attribution, while maintaining the grammatical third person. Sometimes we also talk about "stream of consciousness" or "interior monologue", but these remain three separate but related concepts.

	== 7. Interpreting Narrative ==		== 7. Interpreting Narrative ==

Robert.adlington: /* 5. Closure */

2026-01-11T20:14:13Z

5. Closure

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	** Closure does not have to come at the end of a narrative or indeed at all. Closure and ending are distinct concepts.		** Closure does not have to come at the end of a narrative or indeed at all. Closure and ending are distinct concepts.
	** We want shape in our narratives, but we seem also frequently content with postponing the end - and therefore some final perception of narrative shape - indefinitely.		** We want shape in our narratives, but we seem also frequently content with postponing the end - and therefore some final perception of narrative shape - indefinitely.
	* Suspense - Closure is something we look for in narrative, a desire that authors understand and often expend considerable art to satisfy or to frustrate. It can't be satisfied too quickly, because we seem also to enjoy being in the state of imbalance or tension that precedes closure.		* Suspense and surprise: All successful narratives of any length are chains of suspense and surprise that keep us in a fluctuating state of impatience, wonderment, and partial gratification:
	** In fact, narrative is marked almost everywhere by its lack of closure - this is suspense.		** Closure is something we look for in narrative, a desire that authors understand and often expend considerable art to satisfy or to frustrate. It can't be satisfied too quickly, because we seem also to enjoy being in the state of imbalance or tension that precedes closure. In fact, narrative is marked almost everywhere by its lack of closure - this is suspense.
	* Surprise -		** Surprise
	**		* For Barthes, narratives arouse both expectations and questions and then either give us satisfaction or frustrate us:
			** Expectations (proairetic code) - we recognize by numerous signals, the kind of action or sequence of events that we are reading (revenge, falling in love, escape, murder, a bad dream). Once actions start in a certain way, we expect what follows to be consistent with the overall code. This is another way to look at masterplots: as coded narrative formulas that end with closure.
			*** Half of what gives life to expectations in narrative is their violation, for which the common word is surprise
			*** We have to imperfectly balanced needs: to see expectations fulfilled and to see them violated.
			*** The surprise of a conclusion can casts a light backward over the whole narrative, giving it a new shape and tone as the sense of surprise wears away and the ending is seen to fit.
			*** The key to suspense is the possibility, at least, that things could turn out differently. But for any audience, there is a range of what they will tolerate in the way of surprise.
			*** Codes and formulas thrive on their inflexibility.
			*** Without expectations in the first place we could not appreciate variations.
			*** One of our expectations in almost all narratives of any complexity is that our expectations will turn out to have been anywhere from inadequate to completely wrong. We expect, in short to be surprised!
			*** Narrative can succeed in many ways, not just by delaying the discharge (suspense) but by happily frustrating it altogether (surprise).
			*** A child will want you to read her favorite story every night, though she knows exactly what's going to happen. Clearly narrative provides pleasures other than suspense and surprise.
			** Questions (hermeneutic code) - At the level of questions, we anticipate enlightenment.
			*By not closing, the plays of Shakespeare, like so many other powerful narratives, don't tell us what to think but cause us to think. Narrative as such, to borrow a line from IA Richards, is a "machine to think with".
			*We can say that closure is something we tend to look for in narratives. Closure brings satisfaction to desire, relief to suspense, and clarity to confusion. It normalizes. It confirms the masterplot. At the same time we don't want closure too quickly.

	== 6. Narration ==		== 6. Narration ==