The three elements of story, which are beginning, middle and end, are difficult to define but so ubiquitous and abstract that they can be thought to be metaphysical, which means necessary..
Metaphysics is the study of being: what it means to be and the properties of being. This study can be extended to include invisible and eternal and everywhere concepts not subject to empirical evidence, such as cause, free will and truth. I would extend it to include some other concepts. The terms “start”, continuity” and “end” are also metaphysical in that they each refer to a state of mind that is a thing in itself, which means the terms cannot be translated into any other terms and each have a particular quality that seems unavoidable, party of the necessary vocabulary of existence. The terms are more familiar as “”beginning”, "middle” and "end ", which Aristotle recognized as the three elements of story and Aristotle did not define the three terms. I want to harp on these three terms and apply them to include empirical things and not just the metaphysical uses or the undefined terms to apply to the enigma of the idea and practice of story.
A distinguished historian once said to me that the hardest part of doing history was where to start because you could always find reasons why at an earlier time. Philosophers have a problem about where to start. If the universe emerged from the Big Bang, what started the Big Bang? Maybe there is an endless set of prior causations. Theologians solve the problem to their satisfaction by treating God as an oxymoron. Everything has to have a cause and it goes back to God and He does not have to be caused. God is what Aristotle called the Prime Mover. Look instead at the question of cause in practical or empirical terms. The start of a story is the set of circumstances where an additional factor is introduced that starts things off.
A chess opening is a good example of a start. The positions are placed and the early possible moves have been long studied and so the possibilities of what might happen next can be planned out and compensated until the possible outcomes become so particular or different that chess players have to rely on judgement. FDR knew in the fall of 1941 that Japan was likely to make a move against the United States but thought it would be against American interests in the South Pacific rather than Pearl Harbor. Games like chess and war are less complicated than matters of social dynamics, where there are too many variables, or the human heart, which can seem arbitrary, even though Spinoza thought otherwise, there being explanations, which means how one emotion transforms into another emotion.
Another example of the classification of a start is a premonition as when a person imagines that a look or a greeting leads a person to think the person might become a spouse. Shakespeare is full of premonitions., often magical, as when the witches predict what will happen to Macbeth and the vision of his father’s ghost foretells what in fact Hamlet already suspected, which was that Claudius had killed Hamlet’s father. One of the startling things about Prince Hal in Henry IV is that he gave no sense or omen of greatness. He would remain a wastrel while Hotspur, whom Hal envied, had signs of greatness. People surprise people and so the origin point is misapplied to a person as well as an event. Sometimes, premonitions don’t work out, as when couples see soon enough that they are not right for one another or that a young lawyer discovers that his taste of law was not well founded.
Plans are also the start of a story and so part of that state of being even though they are so overt, so conscious, as to be thought artificial. But at least one side to a war thinks the war is well taken, at least by the Japanese army, while the Japanese navy thought attacking the United States ill founded, not likely to win a long war The Founding Fathers are a good way to start the story of America even though it was already 150 years old because at that point they designed a plan for how to proceed that has lasted for 250 years, which is a pretty good run, in that its basic principles and practices have lasted that long.
Sometimes there is an attempt to do without a start and so to deprive a subject matter of its history by reducing it to being a set of laws that are eternal and perhaps even nonvolitional as when physics describes the laws of matter and energy that preceded any actions, each stage of the universe emerging out of the already given parameters. The same happens in the affronty of sociology to claim that social life, which allows volition, is also subject to inevitable laws of interaction, such as conflict and cooperation and basic social structures such as ethnicity and social class, or at least structures whose origins are in the very distant pasty and not likely to fade any time soon. The story rather is the new combining of variations on the same theme. Everything is fresh but also very new.
The key question is the state of being that is sensed to be a strategy in that it can be assigned to any number of origins for a story. When does it feel right for one step or another to be the origin? What is its quality as a start. D-Day started on the sixth of June or maybe the fifth when the air drops left England, or maybe when Eisenhower was given the command to do so when Marshall made him that or maybe when in December 1941 Chirchill and FDR decided to delay an invasion into France past 1942. Any of these events can serve if the origin point is seen as crucial for the subsequent steps or the outcome, and so a good point at which to start the story. That is why antiabortionists think conception is the start of a birth because it is the start of a distinct entity but the story is more complicated if one intrudes how likely the entity will survive given that many zygotes do not get implanted on the uterus, So a sign of a beginning is some necessary but also nearly irrevocable event so that its abortion seems a great loss, as when the defeat of Gettysburg was the beginning of the end of the Confederacy.
A middle can be better understood as a continuity in that the basic parameters remain the same while events are altered. Dickens has characters that are exaggerated or flamboyant even if the character David Copperfield has a variety of experiences as he grows up and the people who surround him differ from time to time. Continuity is also a better word because it reminds people that a line is continuous when every point in it is defined whether or not the line changes direction or tracks back upon itself. Middles are the parts where the initial conditions have complications introduced and move on to the end where the initial problem that is set out as in a Jane Austen novel, such as the initial condition of being unmarried, goes through the ins and outs of courtship until the end takes place, which is marriage.
Understanding continuities means reconceiving the geographical benchmarks that serve as images for continuity. For example, a promontory is a noticeable feature of the landscape whereby other objects can be compared as when you say I will meet someone like a hill or a monument as a landmark, and so is a singular point rather than a continuity. But note that the landmark is a point within the plain and so stretches out in distance to the two points of gte two people intend to meet, The expanse is made real by the existence of the promontory as is clear where Promontory Point, which is the spot where the two routes of the continental railroad met in Utah, which is a singular spot in a desolate flat landscape that is important because it is a point where east and west meant.
A more significant point about continuities and so the appreciation of timeliness as a quality, is the idea of comparative levels, whereby social classes or salaries or prestige can be compared to one another by a single and often quantifiable measure though it is enough to say that one level is better or worse than another item on the list, as when St. Thomas says it is better to exist than not to exist when the two, existence and nonexistence are ranked qualities but something different, subject to either/or. There is no third entity to allow a comparison of better and worse to be made.
There is a multileveled comparison established by Dante in the Divine Comedy. There are ten levels of Hell and they are compared with one another on the measure of how awful was the failing that results in damnation and the ever increasing pains to be associated with the level of severity of sinfulness. Gluttons are not as bad as heretics and so Dante imagines gluttons as getting dripped on by feces while heretics live in boiling coffins. Dante is ingenious in figuring out qualitatively different species of pain that are better and worse but not quantitatively measured. But is a mistake to understand Dante as having endpoints in his geographical listing of bad character attributes for the same reason that a promontory is thought of as an exceptional point rather than a place to point out a continual expanse. Dante imagines limbo as the least burdensome of the circles that descend in comparison because it is an anomalous situation in that people are not being punished by anything they have done, just not gaining communion with God. Its significance is that the next rung, that of lovers, is in a rung that is higher and lower. The same is true of the lowest rank, where Judas and Brutus are among those frozen in ice, though that doesn’t seem qualitatively worse than less extreme rungs, only a place for the worst of the worst so that the immediately previous rungs are also better or worse. Moreover, Dante is just positing the lowest part of the continuum to feel complete, that where Judas should go even though what Judas did is incomparably worse than what Brutus and Casius did, who simply sullied themselves by assassinating a despot who also happened to be a friend or at least a previous ally, rather than someone who killed the Son of God. Hardly comparable.
It is also the case that the top most and the bottom most tiers of social hierarchies are also lopped off so as to allow fir the universality of continuous statuses as best to worst. Social classes are a continuum whereby people have more or less money or prestige or power-- except for the highest and lowest ranks. The highest rank is not that of president or billionaire. They rank below movie stars who are better known than other highly ranked people and where, among other things, are for the most part exempted from moral judgment. They can behave as they like because they are movie stars, the [person falling into the role, and so even Ingrid Bergman was rehabilitated for her infidelity and new romance. He stars lead different lives than the rest of us and so are non comparative as Woody Allen made clear in “Radio Days”. Similarly, the bottommost rung of the social class ladder is also cut loose by naming them as untouchables, inappropriate for any prestige rather than just lowered prestige. The end points are eliminated and made different in kind so as to preserve the continuity that every other rank is better or worse.
What is the state of being of an end” That means a distinctive kind of experience which cannot be translated into another kind of being. An end need not be Kermode’s meaning of an ending because he is thinking of grand things like an apocalypse which made sense in his time where life and culture were shadowed by the Cold War. An end is the completion that happens in any fully formed story whereby the end refers back to its start in that at least there is an ironic reference about how different the end is from the beginning. Not all novels seem to have an end as does happen when “Gone With the Wind” shows how far the South has come since Ante-Bellum days but even there the movie version ends with “Tomorrow is another day.” which suggests the novel can be endlessly extended just like history can be, new characters and circumstances arising. Nor is there an end to the anecdotes found in the New York Times’ Metropolitan Diary where a street encounter seems pointless and just quizzical because there is no payoff, as is required to make something a joke. Meeting a person who does not even offer a quip is just odd.even if memorable to the person who offers a faux story. Stories can be exquisitely short, as in Ovid, but fully told, so that the action transforms the mythical figure into being what the protagonist is.
Rather., an end is a sense of completion, one marked by a sense of release or relaxation in that the crucial moments have passed, the tension of what might happen having occurred or not and so only seen in the past, now forever unchanged even though there might be codas or sequels to remind a reader or an observer of what has past. The Second World War ended and it soon followed, like the night the day, like the Cold War, where the seeds of it were in the prior age but there are new parameters and characters and great events which form it. The suburbs were after the end of the Second World War and the military issue concerned impending nuclear war which was made possible by the end of the Second World War, that its climax, even more than D-Day, and so appropriately near the very end, all that left the surrender that started the Occupation and the restructuring of the world order into becoming bi-polar everyone on one side or the other however much people tried to be non-aligned.
An era is a way to conceptualize history as a series of stories that have beginnings, middles and ends by focussing on the parameters of social life that remain operative for the length of an era. So Romanticism has early or premature aspects, as when novels and operas become concerned with sexuality as a form of liberation, flowers fully in the new prosody of Wordsworth and Keats and the rhapsody of “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and ends when Dickens starts writing about nineteenth century urban life, filled as they are with multiple stories and incidents, the unities of the arts not reconstructed, let us say, to E. M. Foster, the end of Modernism when the post second world war literature turning to realism rather than Modernist experimentalism, Nabokov not quite fitting in in that he remained a Modernist even when it was past. Eras are constructions to make stories possible.
A good example of a real world end is a jury verdict. The assembled are to make a decision of guilty or not guilty by a jury on the basis of evidence presented in a trial whose procedures are carefully structured. That is why jury trials are so dramatic. They abode by principles of short time and confined space. Yes, there can be appeals on a verdict, but the verdict, which is preceded from its beginning by suspense, is to review or revisit the central climactic moment of declaring a verdict, and so can be included in a larger reframed story whereby the verdict can be reversed or not. But most dramas let the climax at the end because there is nothing to be said about the story but its consequences. The very end of Othello is the murder and Hamlet and others get killed in the fifth act even though Hamlet’s undoing was in his premonition in the play’s beginning.
It is suitable that trials by jury are a highly artificial or constructed set of procedures and so an end is a recognition of when an end point has been reached. Biology is a process rather than a story. It just goes on and on, moving past dinosaurs to mammals and then who knows what because it is not designed, there being a hope or insistence of God so that people can feel life is a story that has a beginning, a middle and an end because stories are so essential a formation of narrative, which is a chronicle without meaning, there being literary stories as old as +Gilgamesh”.That people can fashion or discover any number of endings does not mean they are not real, but rather that people will find them.
Another good example of a real rather than a fictional ending is what is called “closure”, which means that all of the procedures that are associated with what is called “justice” takes place so that the story of a serious wrong committed in the past is ended and so people can resume their lives. Like funerals, which also recognize the end of a life and people can go on now that that person is recognized as gone because the person is buried, a closure is also a release of the suspense of seeing a life uncompleted. An execution of a criminal can be said to provide closure to the family and other survivors because there has been a final act of justice, the survivors getting something from the execution rather than thinking of it as a useless ritual of revenge that just prolongs suffering by treating the execution as if it were the immediate response of a defense against the assailant, the perpetrator taken as if of hot blood when in fact an execution takes place after many years and appeals and in cold blood. But closure ends a story or at least repeats an additional ending so as to make the story shut.
A dream is an ultimate point of an ending in that every moment of a dream has an end in that it has a purpose and so contains untold ens for a story in that every moment is a release from suspense and the accomplishment of a wish. Freud thought that dreams were only about resolving or repressing sexual feelings and Freud was right to think dreams dealt with wishes but he did not sufficiently generalize the dream, being the universal wish fulfillment. Dreams can resolve what a loved one will look like thirty years from now or what a career will be like or what one fears will be a career or other life failure. Dreams include all the things people dream of and so recirculate the past or the premonition of the future into a skewed and distorted present. In fact dreams can do all the things that fiction can do, such as describing a landscape or a character, or having a poignant or snappy exchange, or invoking and expressing dread or loyalty. That is not surprising because dreams are told in stories, as continuous narratives even if clumped together into a sequence of events, the dreamwork trying to make coherent the speed with which thoughts can be created and associated in a sequence so as to tell a story. Dreams are true and full of omens because the unconscious is more insightful than the conscious, overladen as the conscious is by conventional associations and excuses.
At the opposite end of dreams, which are full of endings, there is the opposite phenomenon, which are social situations where social circumstances wiggle out of an ending and so frustrate the feeling of completion. That would happen if a verdict were put aside on a technicality and so justice is not accomplished. Another way of wheedling out is not to have a final verbal confrontation to end a friendship and so leave the relationship hanging, or to be more grandiose, to think that eternity will not settle things right after the Last Coming or, even worse, find before the Pearly Gates an avowed Atheist who will have to move along in his story by making a critical decision: to accept that after all there is a God despite the best evidence otherwise, or to or to still answer that God had fooled you and His evils to be continued as recognized, however foolish it might mean becoming a martyr to what is no longer the truth. Seeing the truth rather than the imagination would seem to be a final end to the question of religion.
Kant said that justice alone is the metaphysical entity that is at once an experience, an interchange and an institution. But many other metaphysical entities also have these three simultaneous properties. Beauty is an attraction, as something to be noticed and acknowledged, and also an institution made up of Hollywood stars and beauty pageants. The same is true of the elements of story, whereby beginning, middle and end each have these three properties, as the examples I offered explained. Moreover, as Kant also said, some words like “should” are ineluctable and so also part of metaphysical existence. It is hard to imagine people pre-dating stories. William Golding, the British novelist, imagined a caveman making a plan for a hunt by imagining himself leaving he and his fellow cave men leaving their lair, traveling to where the game is found, attacking them, and bringing back their now dead quarry, ending the story with a feast. Few words need be used to show prospect, attention and completion.Indeed, it is difficult not to think of higher mammals of not doing the same, as when cheetahs eye some prey or dogs see the dog bowl. Jelly fish may not think ahead, but many creatures do and a biologist can decide when a creature has sufficiently crossed the threshold of consciousness so that stories are formed. And so story and its elements are available as felt experience and metaphysical entities.