When Novels End

This chapter examines why readers, writers, and literary critics sometimes use the vocabulary of loss and mourning to describe the experience of coming to the end of a novel. It relies on the elegies of Thomas Hardy to understand the phenomenology of returning to one’s immediate surroundings after being immersed in a fictional world and of having to detach from fictional persons who continue to dwell in one’s mind. Hardy’s imaginative fascination with one-sided, parasocial relationships that are never reciprocated also reveals that attending to literary characters permits readers to experience forms of negative and positive liberty that are unavailable in real life.