ABSTRACT
Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books revitalised Scottish fiction when it was published in 1981. Critics studying Lanark have generally focused on the Epilogue as a crescendo of postmodernist thematic concerns. This chapter examines the Epilogue as an experience of reading rather than theory and explains its significance as a typographical crescendo, in which the established layout of the text is altered, gradually and progressively, as descriptive running heads, footnotes and marginal notes enclose the linear narrative. The surrounding and diminishing of the narrative 'proper' on the graphic surface by the headers, footnotes and marginalia offers an epilogue with 'epi' in the sense of 'during' rather than 'after'. Alison Lumsden's essay 'Innovation and reaction in the fiction of Alasdair Gray', takes exception to Gray's epilogues. The centrality of Lanark is made clear in that he is the only character to cross from narrative proper into the twilight zone of the Epilogue and back again.
