ABSTRACT
When called to wash hands for lunch, and reluctantly accepting the inevitability of having to finish their game in the smurf village, children seek an ending. It may be a cataclysmic smashing of the village, or the destruction of Gargamel, or the assertion that all the problems of the morning are resolved. They seem to require a story-like sense of an ending. The fantasy-filled narratives concocted by the five-year-old in the kitchen, starting from the available props of a mixing bowl, a toy ring, and mummy’s scarf, constantly seek out the rhythms and patterns of the story form. In common with, apparently, everyone else in the world, children enjoy a good story. The content of young children’s stories is often different in important ways from that which typically engages adults. But the form of the story seems universal: it has a beginning which sets up an expectation, a middle that complicates it, and an ending that satisfies or resolves it. Or, to put it another way, in the beginning anything is possible, in the middle possibilities are gradually reduced and circumscribed, in the end the world of the story is complete and its possibilities reduced unambiguously to one. 1
