Narrative Palindromes II. Endings

Some of the issues in negotiating narrative beginnings and endings include authenticity, closure, and transparency: Who is telling this story and why? Has the reader seen all material? Has all of the content been resolved? In what ways do alternative models of reading apply in understanding how we read into the gap? In this panel, Ryan House’s paper offers an understanding of e-literature in narrative games by focusing on a dynamic albeit not necessarily spatial relationship with media form within analytical gameplay as well in the post-gaming experience. Alex Mitchell draws upon the film viewer’s expectation of narrative endings and the frustration when this expectation is not met. Through revisits, re-readings, and re-interpretations of the text, Mitchell describes how select e-lit texts offer a sense of an ending through multiple encounters. Caitlin Fisher reflects upon the tensions in her own e-literature texts between formal experimentation and the limits of what can realistically be designed, read, and experienced in various e-lit texts. She considers what a “reading on rails”—as a performed and performative narrative trajectory—can offer within these tensions. Marjorie Luesebrink will complete these twinned panels on Narrative Palindromes by exploring the literary limits of beginnings and endings. She considers how literary form— perhaps understood closer to technique than concretization—shapes varied instances of “ending” that are authorial and readerly.