Beginnings and Endings in Hardy’s Major Fiction

Abstract

Because of the length of a novel, our memory of it is disproportionately related to its opening and ending. In the opening chapters, the narrator creates for his readers the physical world in which the novel takes place and the first episodes of the story which begin to reveal the personalities of the characters. But more significantly, beginnings introduce the novel’s cosmology and the standards and values by which actions will be judged. (Of course, since the reading of a novel is an ongoing process, as the reader experiences subsequent episodes, the moral terms on which the reader makes his or her judgement will be modified.) Each novel has its own Genesis and Apocalypse; when we open a novel, our world is closed off and the genesis of a new ontology begins. The opening chapters of the novel, that form which more than any other seeks to have the inclusiveness and specificity of the real world, mimes the process of Creation as the author’s language imposes shape and form upon silence and emptiness. Imperceptibly, as we read the first sentences, our sense of time gives way to the internal imagined time of the novel. The ending is an apocalypse which reorders the significance of all that precedes; it is the moment when the imagined world is abruptly sealed off from us and we return to our diurnal activities.¹

What we call the beginning is often the end.

T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, Four Quartets.