Far-past further on: After graduating, Sophie lacks confidence about
her own art work; decides to go into arts administration.Further on still in the present: Sophie realises that she really wants to
be an artist rather than a manager. Instead of going into another
directorial position, she sells her house, goes to live in the country,
lives on a small income and devotes herself to art, though she
receives no public recognition and makes no sales from her
artworks.This structure (which begins and ends at different points in the present)
maximises the impact of delving back into Sophie’s past in the middle of
the narrative. It enables us to gradually understand how her perception
of the past can enable her to make a radical decision about her future.
There are, however, many other possibilities.
It will also be up to you how much you ‘spell out’ the links between the
past and present: that is, the degree to which you show how they inter-
relate and what their causal relationship is. In experimental narrative the
links between past and present may be less apparent than in a more con-
ventional narrative. Or they may be radically subverted, as in Time’s Arrow
or The Nature of the Offence , by British novelist Martin Amis (2003) , where
the story is told backwards. This matter will be considered in more detail
in Chapter 12, when we consider time–space compression.
CONCLUSION:THE OPEN AND THE CLOSED
All narratives lie at a point along the continuum between open and closed.
A closed narrative is one which is largely resolved. Most detective stories
are closed in the sense that they end in disclosing who did the murder
(though there is an increasing tendency for detective-story writers to
stretch the genre and leave some ambiguity in the matter, creating a more
open narrative). The more resolved Sophie’s situation is, the more closed
the narrative will be. For example, if she obtains another job in a gallery,
and finds out exactly why she was dismissed, then the narrative will be rel-
atively closed. However, if the story is conveyed in such a way that we as
readers start to have doubts about what has really happened, whether there
have been problems in the boardroom and whether Sophie has been
dismissed at all, then the narrative will be very open.
Many of the modes of writing we have been looking at in this chapter
tend toward openness. For example, multiple focalisations create ambigu-
ities about where the truth of the matter lies. Openness of this kind makes
Narrative, narratology, power 107