A summary of Frank Kermode's
The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
(Oxford University Press, 1967)
Summary by Leonor Navales Beltrán
The Sense of an Ending is a book which seeks to establish a connection
between fictions, time and apocalyptic modes of thought. Kermode sees
in apocalyptic certain features which, he suggests, provide a useful
analogy with the process of reading and writing fiction.
The book is divided into six talks. We are going to summarize each one of these paying attention to the most relevant aspects.
The first talk is “The End”.
Frank Kermode explains that there is still a need to speak humanly of a
life’s importance in relation to time -a need in the moment of
existence to be related to a beginning and to an end. He begins by
discussing fictions of the End –about ways in which, under
varying existential pressures, we have imagined the ends of the world.
This will provide clues to the ways in which fictions, whose ends are
consonant with origins, and in concord, however unexpected, with their
precedents, satisfy our needs. So he begins with Apocalypse, which
ends, transforms, and is concordant. He says that apocalyptic thought
belongs to rectilinear rather than cyclical views of the world. The
events derive their significance from a unitary system, not from their
correspondence with events in other cycles. He offers us the example of
the journey of Aeneas where the episodes are related internally; they
all exist under the shadow of the end. But he asserts that, although
for us the End has perhaps lost its naïve imminence, its shadow
still lies on the crises of our fictions; we may speak of it as
Kermode explains that men rush “into the middest”, in
medias res, when they are born; they also die in mediis rebus, and to
make sense of their span they need fictive concords with origins and
ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems. The End they imagine
will reflect their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations. They fear
it as the End is a figure for their own deaths.
He later offers the example of the Bible. It begins at the beginning
and ends with a vision of the end; the first book is Genesis, the last
Apocalypse. Ideally, it is a wholly concordant structure; the end is in
harmony with the beginning, the middle with beginning and end. The end,
Apocalypse, is traditionally held to resume the whole structure, which
it can only do by figures predictive of that part of it which has not
been historically revealed. The great majority of interpretations of
Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the
historical allegory always has to be revised; time discredits it. And
this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being
discredited. Kermode explains that you can of course arrange for the
End to occur at pretty well any desired date, but the most famous of
all predicted Ends is A.D. 1000. It is now thought that earlier
historians exaggerated the “Terrors” of that year, but it
need not be doubted that it produced a characteristic
apocalypse-crisis. The Terrors and Decadence are two of the recurring
elements in the apocalyptic pattern. Another permanent feature of the
pattern was also illustrated in the crisis of the year 1000, and this
Kermode calls clerkly scepticism. When the year 1000 came, there were
some portents, even though it lapsed without universal catastrophe.
Naturally there were those who simply thought the calculations were
wrong. And this is something that occurs regularly in the literature.
More sophisticated calculations could produce other dates as near
one’s own moment as desirable.
This has relevance to literary plots; and for him there is the same
co-existence of naïve acceptance and scepticism there as there is
in apocalyptic. The story that proceeded very simply to its obviously
predestined end would be nearer myth than novel or drama. Peripeteia,
which has been called the equivalent, in narrative, of irony in
rhetoric, is present in every story of the least structural
sophistication. Now peripeteia depends on our confidence of the end;
the interest of having our expectations falsified is obviously related
to our wish to reach the discovery or recognition by an unexpected and
instructive route. So that in assimilating the peripeteia we are
enacting that readjustment of expectations in regard to an end which is
so notable a feature of naïve apocalyptic. But the more daring the
peripeteia, the more we may feel that the work respects our sense of
reality; and the more certainly we shall feel that the fiction under
consideration is one of those which, by upsetting the ordinary balance
of our naïve expectations, is finding something out for us,
something real. Kermode adds that all these are novels which most of us
would agree to be at least very good. They represent in varying degrees
that falsification of simple expectations as to the structure of a
future which constitutes peripeteia. We cannot, of course, be denied an
end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. But
unless we are extremely naïve, we do not ask that they progress
towards that end precisely as we have been given to believe. In fact we
should expect only the most trivial work to conform to pre-existent
Kermode finishes this talk giving us a kind of summary. For him, the
main object is the critical business of making sense of some of the
radical ways of making sense of the world. Apocalypse and the related
themes are strikingly long-lived; and that is the first thing to say
about them, although the second is that they change. The apocalyptic
types –empire, decadence and renovation, progress and
catastrophe- are fed by history and underlie our ways of making sense
of the world from where we stand, in the “middest”.
The second talk is “Fictions”.
Kermode starts saying that he suggested that there have been great
changes, especially in recent times when our attitudes to fiction in
general have grown so sophisticated; although it seems, at the same
time, that in “making sense” of the world we still feel a
need, harder than ever to satisfy because of an accumulated scepticism,
to experience that concordance of beginning, middle, and end which is
the essence of our explanatory fictions, and especially when they
belong to cultural traditions which treat historical time as primarily
rectilinear rather than cyclic.
Then, he tells us that it is pretty surprising, given the range of
modern literary theory, that nobody has ever tried to relate the theory
of literary fictions to the theory of fictions in general. For him
there is a simple relation between literary and other fictions which
seems more obvious than has appeared.
He asserts that we have to distinguish between myths and fictions.
Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously
held to be fictive. Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which
presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and
were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures. Fictions are
for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making
change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of
change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for conditional assent. Myths
make sense in terms of a lost order of time; fictions, if successful,
make sense of the here and now.
He goes on saying that literary fictions belong to Vaihinger’s
category of “the consciously false”. They are not subject,
like hypotheses, to proof or disconfirmation, only, if they come to
lose their operational effectiveness, to neglect.
Normally we associate “reality” with chronos
(“passing time” or “waiting time”), and a
fiction which entirely ignored this association we might think
unserious or silly or mad. Yet in every plot there is an escape from
chronicity, and so, in some measure, a deviation from this norm of
“reality”. But he affirms that any novel, however
“realistic”, involves some degree of alienation from
He mentions, then, the work of Georges Poulet who argues that medieval
men did not distinguish as we do between existence and duration; one
can only say that they were less in need than we are of fictions
relation to time. For Kermode, it is our insatiable interest in the
future that makes it necessary for us to relate to the past, and to the
moment in the middle by plots: by which he means not only concordant
imaginary incidents, but all the other, perhaps subtler, concords that
can be arranged in a narrative. Such concords can be called
The third talk is “World without End or Beginning”.
He starts saying that there is a correlation between subtlety and
variety in our fictions and remoteness and doubtfulness about ends and
origins. There is a necessary relation between the fictions by which we
order our world and the increasing complexity of what we take to be the
“real” history of that world. And he proposes to ask some
questions about an early and very interesting example of this relation.
There was a long-established opinion that the beginning was as
described in Genesis, and that the end is to be as obscurely predicted
in Revelation. But he asked what if this came to be doubtful. He
answers by speaking of what happened in the thirteenth century when
Christian philosophers grappled with the view of the Aristotelians that
nothing can come of nothing so that the world must be thought to be
eternal. In the Bible the world is made out of nothing. For the
Aristotelians, however, it is eternal, without beginning or end. To
examine the Aristotelian arguments impartially one would need to behave
as if the Bible might be wrong. The thirteenth-century rediscovery of
Aristotle led to the invention of double-truth.
St. Augustine came up with a formless matter, intermediate between
nothing and something, out of which the world was made. This, of
course, was created out of nothing. Formless, it had the potentiality
of form, its privations is its capacity to receive form. He identifies
this capacity with mutability; creation, for him, is a concept
inseparable from that of mutability, of which time is the mode. Thus we
have a creation of which the law relating to forms is a law of change
and succession, and a Creator whose realms and forms are changeless and
But St. Thomas thought reason could prove neither creation ex nihilo
nor an eternal world, saying that we must believe that former not
because of any rational proof but simply because of revelation. In this
way Aquinas saved the Christian origins but substituted an Aristotelian
for an Augustinian account of prime matter. He also needed a new
rationale for angels. The angles could not be pure being, since then
they would be indistinguishable form God; so they must either be
allowed to possess materiality, or to be of a third order, neither
matter, with its potentiality, nor pure act, but immaterial with
potentiality. St. Thomas decided that the latter was the right choice.
They are therefore neither eternal nor of time. So out of this
argument, which is ultimately an argument about origins, there develops
a third duration, between that of time and eternity. Needing to give it
a name, he called this third order aevum.
This concord-fiction soon proved that it had uses outside its immediate
context, angelology. Because it served as a means of talking about
certain aspects of human experience, it was humanized. The concept of aevum
provides a way of talking about this unusual variety of duration
–neither temporal nor eternal, but, as Aquinas said,
participating in both the temporal and the eternal. It does not abolish
time; it co-exists with it, and is a mode in which things can be
perpetual without being eternal.
The concept of aevum, for
Kermode, had human uses. It contains beings (angels) with freedom of
choice and immutable substance, in a creation which is in other
respects determined. Although these beings are out of time, their acts
have a before and an after. Aevum,
he might say, is the time-order of novels. Characters in novels are
independent of time and succession, but may and usually do seem to
operate in time and succession; the aevum
co-exists with temporal events at the moment of occurrence. If the
world was not eternal there was nevertheless quite recognizably a sort
of immortality, perpetuity, in certain aspects of human life.
For him, this kind of fiction is likely to be reflected in literature.
It facilitates a different, more flexible attitude to life as it seems
to be when you look at the whole picture from your place in the
The fourth talk is “The Modern Apocalypse”.
He takes up the patterns of apocalypse, and considers their relevance
to our own times. Up to this point he has spoken of certain arbitrarily
chosen aspects of apocalyptic thinking and feeling: of the Terrors, of
Decadence and Renovation, of Transition, and of Clerkly Scepticism. He
argues that there must be a link between the forms of literature and
other ways in which, and he quotes Erich Auerbach, “we try to
give some kind of order and design to the past, the present and the
future”. One of these ways is crisis. He begins by saying
something about the modern sense of crisis. Crisis is inescapably a
central element in our endeavours towards making sense of our world.
For him, we think of our own crisis as pre-eminent, more worrying, and
more interesting than other crises. It seems doubtful that our crisis,
our relation to the future and to the past, is one of the important
differences between us and our predecessors. And we can best talk about
the differentiae of modern crisis in terms of the literature it
produces; it is by our imagery of past and present and future, rather
than from our confidence in the uniqueness of our crisis, that the
character of our apocalypse must be known. He adds that the moments we
call crises are ends and beginnings.
He says that, when we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain
now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident. He offers the
example or Yeats to illustrate them. He saw his time as a time of
transition, the last moment before a new annunciation, a new gyre.
Kermode affirms that we can fin in him all the elements of the
apocalyptic paradigm that concern us. There are the terror; the clerkly
scepticism proper to a learned aristocrat confronted by these images of
horror; a deep conviction of decadence and a prophetic confidence of
renovation; and all this involved in the belief that his moment was the
moment of supreme crisis, when one age change into another by means of
a movement he called a “gradual coming and increase”.
Kermode realizes that the belief that one’s own age is
transitional between two major periods turns into a belief that the
transition itself becomes an age, a “saeculum”. The fiction
of transition is our way of registering the conviction that the end is
immanent rather than imminent; it reflects our lack of confidence in
ends, our mistrust of the apportioning of history to epochs of this and
that. Our own epoch is the epoch of nothing positive, only of
transition. Since we move from transition to transition, we may suppose
that we exist in no intelligible relation to the past, and no
predictable relation to the future.
He finishes by comparing two phases of modernism, our own and that of
fifty or so years ago, which he calls the traditionalist modernism. For
him, what distinguishes the new from the older modernism in this
context is not that one is more apocalyptic than the other but that
they have such different attitudes to the past. To the older it is a
source of order; to the newer it is that which ought to be ignored.
Each reacts to a “painful transitional situation”, but one
in terms of continuity and the other in terms of schism. The common
topics are transition and eschatological anxiety; but one reconstructs,
the other abolishes the indispensable and relevant past. These
distinctions made, it remains to affirm also the continuity of
Next talk is “Literary Fiction and Reality”.
In this one, Kermode talks about clerical scepticism as a factor in the
changing condition of literary fiction. For him, in our phase of
civility, the novel is the central form of literary art. Its history is
an attempt to evade the laws of what Scott called “the land of
fictions” –the stereotypes which ignore reality, and whose
remoteness from it we identify as absurd. The revolt against the
customs or laws of fiction creates its new laws, in their turn to be
broken. For Kermode, nowhere else are we so conscious of the dissidence
between inherited forms and our own reality.
Then he talks about Sartre’s La Nausée.
He wants to show that this book represents a kind of crisis in the
relation between fiction and reality, the tension or dissonance between
paradigmatic form and contingent reality. Sartre’s philosophy is
a philosophy of crisis, but his world has no beginning and no end. For
Kermode, the book is only another way of talking about the relation
between fictions as we use them in our existential crises, and fictions
as we construct them in books. The world a novel makes is unlike the
world of our common experience because it is created and because it has
the potency of a humanly imaginative creation. No novel can avoid being
in some sense what Aristotle calls “a completed action”.
This being so, all novels imitate a world of potentiality, even if this
implies a philosophy disclaimed by their authors. They have a fixation
on the imagery of beginning, middle, and end, potency and cause.
Novels, then, have beginnings, ends, and potentiality, even if the
world has not. Kermode adds that, in the same way, it can be said that
whereas there may be, in the world, no such thing as character, since a
man is what he does and chooses freely what he does, in the novel there
can be no just representation of this, for if the man were entirely
free he might simply walk out of the story, and if he had no character
we should not recognize him. He ends up by saying that the novel, then,
provides a reduction of the world different from that of the treatise.
It has to lie. Truth would be found only in a silent poem or a silent
novel. As soon as it speaks, begins to be a novel, it imposes causality
and concordance, development, character, a past which matters and a
future within certain broad limits determined by the project of the
author rather than that of the characters. They have their choices, but
the novel has its end.
And the last talk is “Solitary Confinement”.
Kermode starts saying that none of our fictions is a supreme fiction.
Our knowing this creates in us, to a most painful degree, the condition
Sartre calls “need” and Stevens “poverty”. To
be alone and poor is, in a sense, everybody’s fate; but some
people have been alone and poor in a very literal sense, as most of us
have not; and in solitary confinement some of them have tested the
gaiety of language as a means of projecting their humanity on a hostile
He analyses the work of Christopher Burney, the author of Solitary confinement,
who was a British agent in occupied France. The book begins after his
capture, though at a time when he still found solitude and confinement
mere notions with no real force. What follows is a study of those
notions as they become real. It is a book about the world a man invents
in real poverty and solitude, and with as little help as possible from
prefabricated formulas. What makes Burney’s book as it was
post-tragic is his need to understand his plight alone. In this true
poverty everything had to be re-invented –even the clock. Burney
needed a clock not because the conventional divisions of time were of
pressing importance, but for reasons closer to those of the minks who
first made them. They needed clock for the more devout observance of
the offices, Burney because he needed to apprehend the increasing
pressure of an approaching end. As long as his captivity was story-like
in that its moments were to be given significance by an end, he needed
to sense its imminence. If time cannot be felt as successive, this end
ceases to have effect; without the sense of passing time one is
virtually ceasing to live, one loses “contact with reality”.
Kermode says that all types of fiction, inherited or invented,
naïve or sophisticated, run together in the mind that seeks
freedom in poverty. They are all part of the world of words, of the
cheat which gives life to the world.
He has used Burney because we can think of his book as a model of a
more general solitary confinement, of the fictions and interpretations
of human beings “doing time”, imagining ends and concords.
“Men die because they cannot join the beginning to the
end”, but living is trying to do it. We give ourselves meaning by
inventing critical time.
Kermode ends the book affirming that the problem of beginnings and ends
in a form which, paradigmatically, imitates the form of the world, is
created. So the best beginnings are the best faked. Ends are ends only
when they are not negative but frankly transfigure the events in which
they were immanent. We have our vital interest in the structure of
time, in the concords books arrange between beginning, middle, and end.