I recently finished a novel that was quite good, but ended with the (in my opinion) somewhat clichéd conclusion where a character starts writing a book, and the first lines are the same first lines that start the novel, and thus the whole thing is an infinite loop.
I remember being extremely impressed by this narrative trick when I was a teenager and saw it in a Robert Ludlum novel, The Chancellor Manuscript (1977). Now, if a middlebrow thriller writer like Ludlum was doing this in the 1970s, I figure it must have been around a long while and that I’m probably missing some pretty famous examples of this.
Can anyone list any other instances of this? Who was the first author to do this?
Neil Gaiman’s short story “Other People” starts where it finishes, with the line “Time is fluid here”. By the second time, of course, it has a lot more meaning to it.
For those afraid to click on QtM’s post (which you should be, since there is zero indication of what’s inside it), allow me to help. This is probably what he should have written:
Kinda sorta what you are asking for: There is an Asimov short story (can’t remember the title) about mankind trying to figure out how to reverse entropy as the eons go by and the universe slowly expires. A super computer eventually figures it out, and solves the problem by saying:
Close Up by Len Deighton ends with a writer about to write a roman a clef of the events in the book, ending with the starting words of the novel.
Regarding the Asimov story, he once wrote that whenever somebody told him that they remembered reading a great story of his but couldn’t remember which one, it turned out invariably to be “The Last Question.”
Not quite the same but Watership Down starts with the line “The primroses were over” and ends with something like “and the first primroses were starting to bloom.”