Concluding: Reaching Provisional and Final Judgements

Abstract

The fact that a story has an ending at all marks it as different from our daily, real-life ‘human possibilities’. I know that my own personal life story will come to an end, but I do not know that I will have the opportunity to reflect on it after it is over. Even if there is some post-life reflecting room, it will have to take account of much accidental and incidental detritus. As we begin our exploration of the subjunctive world of the story, we can make connections to our own sense of human life; as we come to the end of this shaped and selective narrative, we can make fewer comparative links to the hodge-podge of daily existence. The ending is, in some ways, the most artificial element of the story; in Ryan’s terms, we must consider ‘a sequence of events forming a unified causal chain and leading to closure’ (2006, p. 8). As we explore this most unnatural, most un-life-like element of the story, we must shift the deictic centre out of the events and back to ourselves as interpreter, looking to make sense of the whole.