ACCORDING TO MANY TWENTIETH-CENTURY DISCUSSIONS of narrative form, closure is one of the defining elements of a narrative. Critics from James, Sartre, and Benjamin up through the structuralists of Frank Kermode have stressed the importance of endings in giving shape and meaning to the stories humans tell. One of the most lengthy and interesting recent considerations of the functioning of closure in narrative appears in Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.1 In a series of essays on nineteenth-century novels and Freudian models for narrative, Brooks elaborates a definition of narrative as metonymy leading to metaphor, a chain of moments driven by desire to the quiescence and coherent significance of closure. For Brooks closure does not merely end the story and provide retrospective illumination for the previ-