ABSTRACT
This chapter remains with the large-scale structures of narrative to examine the process of closure: how closure in the detective story forms a special case, and the consequences of its subversion or refusal in the pastiche. If the ending of a story is to provide readers with a sense of closure, representational concerns must be subordinated to structural and symbolic ones, in order that the narrative as a whole may reach a meaningful destination. Narrative closure is at the same time an ordering and controlling force through the length of the text, a point of representational crisis. The reader interprets the events of the text in the future anterior, on the understanding that they will have been significant, that they have been selected and presented for a purpose, which the denouement will justify when it eventually arrives. Le Meridien de Greenwich has an ending that might appear highly suitable for a standard crime thriller.
