Towards a secular theory of the end: A structural study of the endings of novels in French and English from 1700-present

This thesis argues that the way novels end is a question of how they represent time. It suggests that there are two possible ways of modelling time through textual structures and that novels can be situated somewhere between these two ideas. The first is the transcendent model, where we are able to consider the narrative as if from above, viewing it as a single, bounded whole. The second is the secular model, where the text contains a slice of narrative from within a wider span which extends limitlessly beyond and before the material text.
In the first part, I look at a corpus of canonical texts from the eighteenth and long nineteenth centuries from across a range of genres. In my analysis, I put forward the argument that despite their generic differences these texts all handle time in a very similar way, which has much in common with the dominant Christian understandings of time. I argue that certain common literary structures explicitly play out the idea of end-time, making it an identifiable secondary temporal plane.
In the second part, I turn towards a corpus of contemporary texts from an equally varied range of genres. Here I argue that novels which represent secular time show how the narrative and narrative world have no recognisable end points, much like the passage of real, lived time. I propose a set of terms which can be used to describe the characteristics of such endings: partial, premature, unfollowable, episodic, multiple. I argue that ending texts in secular time not only changes the structure of the text but also changes the imaginative relationship between author and reader.
Overall, this thesis seeks to bring nuance to the study of endings by developing a terminology for those aspects of endings which have yet to be theorised.