"Books without end": Multiple endings in fictional narratives

Multiple endings as a narrative device are employed in postmodern literature. They become conventional for interactive narratives, but remain unusual for traditional ones. They demonstrate how literary narratives can combine narrative logic with game logic in an attempt to expand the boundaries of the literary medium. The aim of this article is to consider multiple endings in several perspectives: in the context of unnatural narratology, the theory of possible worlds, in the comparison of traditional and interactive narrative forms, in their correlation with more familiar, "single" endings. At the same time, multiple endings, presenting alternative versions of the events to the reader, find their own place in the history of narrative forms, traditionally paying attention to the ways of presenting "alternatives": in this case, they are comparable with both "open" and "alternative" endings. Multiple endings are a narrative phenomenon, that is, they point the reader to several versions of the completion of the story, but not the text; they problematize the ratio of the narrative ending and the narrative closure. Multiple endings are researched in this article on the examples provided by R. Coover, J. Fowles, M. Bradbury. In each of the cases considered, multiple endings simulate the incompleteness of the story, simultaneously creating the illusion of a choice for the reader; but in each of these cases, this illusion is destroyed, demonstrating the collision of the incompleteness of the story and the fundamental completeness of the text. Each of the literary experiments imposes its own limitations on the reader's interaction with such a narrative form: Coover resorts to creating an excessive number of endings that do not allow the reader to relate himself to the characters, nor to follow their development, nor to reduce the distance in relation to them. He extends excess as a principle to work with the representation of individual events in the story, involving the reader in the flow of actions, producing a disorientation effect on them. With the help of multiple endings, Fowles switches the reader's attention from interacting with the hero to interacting with the narrator - thereby producing the effect not of suspense, but of meta-suspense. Bradbury further emphasizes the impossibility of choosing even in a situation where several alternatives are explicitly presented to the reader: he puts more emphasis than Fowles or Coover on the metafictional dimension of the narrative, involving the reader in the "history of writing". All these experiments are aimed at creating a game narrative, in relation to which the reader inevitably keeps a distance, but they also point to the possible development of narrativity - already at its present stage. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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