"George Eliot is committed, ultimately, not to openness and discontinuity but to narrative closure" Sally Shuttleworth, Reader Page 296.

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“George Eliot is committed, ultimately, not to openness and discontinuity but to narrative closure” Sally Shuttleworth, Reader Page 296

In order to answer the question and discuss the quotation regarding “narrative closure”, it is necessary to understand the meaning of closure and the closure concerned in Eliot’s Middlemarch.

 “CLOSURE (Latin clausura, "a closing"): Closure has two common meanings. First, it means a sense of completion or finality at the conclusion of play or narrative work--especially a feeling in the audience that all the problems have been resolved satisfactorily. Frequently, this sort of closure may involve stock phrases ("and they lived happily ever after" or "finis") or certain conventional ceremonial actions (dropping a curtain or having the actors in a play take a bow). The narrative may reveal the solution of the primary problem(s) driving the plot, the death of a major character (especially the antagonist or the protagonist's romantic interest), or careful denouement. (1) Bibliography

 When looking at Middlemarch at face value, it seems an excellent example of extended denouement with the narrative closure. The narrative begins ab ovo, from the start and work its way to the conclusion. The author carefully explains what happened in later years to each character in the novel.

The Finale or the final summing up of the novel’s many plots and characters is traditional with nineteenth century writing.

“Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after years.”

The story had to be concluded in such a way that enabled the reader to know the future of every character. Although these last comments may seem superfluous in modern times, they fit the total structure of the novel. Just as the separate incidents are given a beginning to an end, the lives of the characters are not completed until the reader knows how their lives turn out after the dramatic episodes they have been through. A good example of this is Dorothea. The Dorethea at the start of the novel and the Dorethea, wife of Will, are two very different people: she changes from an idealistic girl into a wise woman. Dorethea although retaining her warmth and compassion for fellow beings, resigns herself to becoming a good wife rather than “performing heroic deeds”. She does not develop into a modern St Theresa, but instead becomes an admirable character that influences the “growing good of the world” and is someone who proves “that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been”. The final paragraph stresses the sublime quality of individual goodness, the altruism that is a higher moral idea in practice than the achievement of ambition.

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It is necessary to investigate the form and structure of the narrative within Middlemarch in order to explore the issue of complete closure and the lack of “openness”.

The subject and not the object of the story produce the form of Middlemarch. This suggests that Eliot would not agree with impersonal narration on philosophical grounds because it did not acknowledge the role of the subject in the creation of the structure. Narration, whether it is omniscient or impersonal implies form as any narrative gives material its shape and structure. Even when the narrative seems neutral in Middlemarch, it is easy ...

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