YOU PICK UP A novel, open to page one, and your heart sinks. Why? No number, no title. In other words, no chapters. You’re facing the bleak prospect of life without breaks, the long, long slog through an untrammeled narrative wilderness. Does it matter, having or not having chapters? Sure, in ways both trivial and profound. Without chapter breaks, when do you turn off the lamp and go to sleep? When do you reward yourself with a cookie or a hot chocolate? When do you feel that you’ve got somewhere? But chapter breaks—and the text that separates them—are more than mere rest areas on the reading interstate. Done right, they tell us that something significant has happened, that a certain interval of time or unified activity or narrative unit has passed. Done badly, of course, they can just mean that 3,987 words have elapsed since the last white space in the text. Ideally, though, chapters exist to contain a meaningful block of story. They sometimes have clever titles explaining their contents. They may have beginnings, middles, and ends. Sometimes, in recent novels, they’re even freestanding stories that may or may not seem like parts of a single narrative body. Whatever their shape or external features, all chapters have some aim involving readers and meaning, some reason for looking the way they do.
Once upon a time, chapters fell into disrepute. That was during the modernist period, and the disdain the moderns—Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and company—show toward the chapter was really an expression of their disdain toward all things Victorian. The Victorians, you see, had perfected the chapter as the key element in their perfection of linear narrative. Nineteenth-century British novels go from A to Z with a smoothness and regularity that you couldn’t improve upon if you wrote a thousand novels. They move like clockwork, or rather, like calendar work. They were linear because they were serial, their appearance spread out over time. We’ll come back to how and why all that happened in a few chapters.
The shape of the Victorian novel, from a plot standpoint, was a series of exaggerated smiley-faces hooked together. Each episode started from the high of the previous cliff-hanger, then slacked off in intensity to conduct the business of these two or three chapters, then a kick-up at the end into another cliff-hanger. And chapters are an integral part of this episodic structure. The writer couldn’t hope to maintain that high intensity of last month’s closing spike, so he had to bring the reader down slowly—nobody likes a crash landing—to a level that was manageable, a level of only modest intensity. That’s where most of the chapters would take place. Often, there would be a small upward spike at the end of a chapter in the middle of the episode, then a big spike in the chapter that ended the installment.
You can go through almost any Victorian novel and figure out exactly where the installments ended. That will be where the big stuff happens: kidnappings, mysterious appearances or disappearances, the discovery of a corpse, the letter revealing (a) inheritance, (b) loss of the inheritance, (c) true paternity, or (d) some combination thereof. If the novel had a regular publication history, those moments will be at the end of even-numbered chapters, since many novels followed the two-chapter-per-installment formula. Not all, though, so it can be a little tricky. But you’ll be able to tell. They were good at this stuff. They had to be, as an economic imperative and as an expression of narrative art.
Chapters in traditional novels can sport a lot of different looks, with titles or roman numerals or arabic numerals or some other delineating sign, but they all fulfill one basic, common function: they break a vast narrative down into some sort of meaningful unit. In Chapter LVIII (I believe that would be fifty-eight but don’t entirely trust my roman numerology) of the decidedly pre-Victorian Pride and Prejudice, Austen brings together Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy on a walk alone where, for the first time, they can frankly discuss their previous actions, explain their motives, ask for and receive forgiveness, and reveal their love for each other. The chapter begins and ends with the walk, and by the time they part in the hall, everything is explained to the satisfaction of both, and naturally they will marry. It is a miracle of economy. Everything one might want addressed in the chapter is present; nothing extraneous dares intrude.
Dickens prefers titles for his chapters. So do I. Titles give you something to work with from the start. “In Chancery” says a lot more than “I” or even “Chapter 1” ever could. It is, in fact, the opening chapter of Bleak House, and one of the greatest first chapters ever written.
London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimneypots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
How can you not want to read what’s coming? The answer is, you can’t. That’s why he was a huge bestseller in his day. What kind of story must follow from such an opening paragraph? This is a place that’s almost mythic in its wretchedness and misery. And then there’s the fog, which he introduces in the next paragraph:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
So just like that, we have a motif, a recurrent element—in this case an image, the fog—that will hang around to remind us of a central problem in the story. Before the chapter’s over, motif will become theme, an idea or attitude about things, as the fog turns out to be not merely at large in the atmosphere but in the Court of Chancery (like an American probate court, minus expeditiousness): in the solicitors and the clerk and the Chancellor as well as in the air of the place, a miasma of confusion and indolence, of claim and counterclaim, of unresolved cases hovering like ghosts, like bad dreams, for generations.
Somehow, again miraculously, all this happens in the space of five pages. Without introducing any of the principals involved in his novel, Dickens manages to lay out a problem, a location, the particular case (Jarndyce and Jarndyce), a mood, a theme, and a very compelling image. It’s so good, we practically don’t need the next 660 pages. At the very least we’re primed for the introduction of a main character or two. And we will get them pronto.
This is what chapters do, by convention: achieve small structures in support of the large structure of the book. A traditional chapter has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It offers readers something: a small story within the larger one, a scene that develops a theme or idea, a shift in the direction of the plot attributable to a single event or accident (accidents are great narrative devices in traditional novels).
What’s that you say? Those are just moldy oldies? What about newer books? Sure. If you want convention observed, look at genre novels. Chapter 53 of Robert B. Parker’s A Catskill Eagle shows us the chapter as endgame. Spenser, the detective-hero, finds his way into the enemy lair, confronts the bad guy, kills him, settles his personal account with another character, and escapes from a place swarming with security guards and other armed types. All very tidy, except for the blood. This isn’t terribly high-brow writing—the subtitle could be “Spenser and Hawk Go Cross-Country and Shoot People”—but it’s efficient writing. Every chapter has business to accomplish, and it does. Beginning-middle-end. Mini-narratives. Plot twists. Punchy finishes.
THEN, NOT TOO MANY years after the death of Queen Victoria herself, things changed. Along with linear narrative, hard-driving plot structures, exaggerated minor characters, and buttoned-up morality, the moderns gave chapters the ax. In a great many modern novels, chapters are vague affairs, if they appear at all. Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance, has only five numbered sections. Those aren’t chapters, whatever they may be. Stages of development of the character and narrative, perhaps. His Ulysses contains eighteen untitled, unnumbered episodes corresponding more or less to episodes from his Homeric model, The Odyssey. Those episodes, however, are less chapters than occasions to change the technical devices of the narrative. Woolf has no chapters in Mrs. Dalloway, rather loose, numbered sections in To the Lighthouse that are more centers of consciousness than narrative structures, and sections named for speakers in The Waves. None of these novels could be accused of being heavily plotted, of course, and in Woolf’s case they tend to move any direction but in a straight chronological line.
Woolf was friends with E. M. Forster, who was just a few years older but miles away in sensibility. His A Room with a View offers a Victorian approach to chapters—very linear narratively, almost sub-stories within the main body of narrative, and with catchy titles like “In Santa Croce with No Baedeker” or “How Miss Bartlett’s Boiler Was So Tiresome.” This novel appeared in 1908, just a few years before Woolf began publishing her work. Her novels of the teens share many conventional aspects with Forster’s work. By the time she gets to To the Lighthouse (1927), though, she is using individual consciousness, what she calls “moments of being,” as her organizing principle. Her narration is less about events than about how we experience and process events subjectively. As one might expect, her “chapters” are moments within, typically, a single consciousness. The book is divided into three sections, “The Window,” “Time Passes,” and “The Lighthouse,” the first and third each comprising a single day, the middle one covering roughly ten years. In Chapter 9 of “The Window,” we follow the thoughts of William Bankes, a friend and summer guest of the Ramsay family, as he ruminates on Mr. Ramsay, then “passes” the narration to another guest, Lily Briscoe, who thinks about William and about Mrs. Ramsay and about the picture Lily is trying to paint, and then they “share” the narration to complete the experience of a moment. Nothing happens in the ordinary sense; two people merely see the world around them. And yet, something has happened. When Mrs. Ramsay thinks, later in the evening, that Lily and William must marry, the idea strikes her like a thunderbolt. Yet it’s wrongheaded on one level, superfluous on another. While Lily and William are ill-suited to a permanent life together, they have already achieved a matching of minds, if only in the transitory realm. Most of the chapters of the novel’s first and third sections act in this way, as the consciousnesses of one or more persons gather around the small events of a moment.
So then, are they chapters? As with most things literary, you’ll get debate. Traditionalists may well say that these aren’t chapters because they don’t go anywhere, that they lack shape or direction. But they have exactly the right shape for the novel they inhabit, and their narrative direction, if it can be called that, is a small version of the novel’s larger narrative direction. They’re not Dickens chapters, nor James, Fielding, Austen, or Eliot chapters. But I would argue that they’re just what we want, here, in this novel. In fact, I would argue that they illustrate the Law of Chapter and Verse: A chapter, as a section that makes sense for its particular novel, follows no rules but its own.
Only the reader, finally, can decide if a chapter does indeed make sense in the context of its novel. They can be straightforward or subtle, logical or mystifying, transparent or opaque. They can be, as in Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones novels, diary entries for single days or, as in the openings of some James A. Michener novels, records of geological time. None of that matters. What does matter is that somehow, and that how is pretty variable, the chapter must work for the novel that houses it.
I started thinking seriously about chapters a couple of decades ago when I read one called “Oh, Mama, Can This Really Be the End?” Two things were going on when I saw the title. First, like every other person of my generation, I could complete the couplet: “to be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues again.” It’s Bob Dylan, of course. No one else could or would write those lines. The second thing I noticed was that the context had absolutely nothing to do with Dylan or Memphis or Mobile or even America, except that its author had, like me, first heard the song when it was new, in his youth. He’s T. Coraghessan Boyle, whose nom de plume (his birth name is Thomas John Boyle) ranks among my absolute favorites with Petroleum V. Nasby and Sparse Grey Hackle. And the novel is Water Music, a wily mix of genres set in the late eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries and centered on the discovery and early exploration of the River Niger. The novel bounces between dueling storylines, one an adventure, or possibly misadventure, yarn involving the historical discoverer of the Niger, Mungo Park. The other is a picaresque romp featuring the entirely fictitious and wonderfully named Ned Rise, a ne’er-do-well who manages to scuffle his way from one calamity to another yet keep on scuffling. This being a contemporary novel, the reader knows which character will, as it were, rise to the top by novel’s end. Indeed, the relative fortunes of the high- and low-born protagonists constitutes one of Boyle’s main critiques of the traditional novel. And the lengthy Dylan quotation relative to a very short (only about a page) chapter reminds readers, were they ever in doubt, that this is a postmodern novel. The anachronism, the cheeky attitude, the element of parody that is present throughout all announce a take on the world and the novel that is less than earnest, that is an attack on earnestness. That’s a lot for a tiny chapter and its unwieldy title to accomplish.
When you see something like Boyle’s chapter, you have to consider the function of chapters, or at least I do. And it turns out they can be anything. They can be solid narratives, complete in themselves. They can even be freestanding stories that make sense out of the context of their novel. They can focus on single events or on chains of occurrences. They can be impressionistic renderings or subjective responses to the events of the novel. They can be, in short, whatever the novelist wants them to be.
So who benefits from chapters? Almost anyone whose stories are heavily plot-driven. I already mentioned the great Victorians. But also mystery novelists, writers of historical romances (or every other kind) or westerns or horror novels. All those mini-endings allow for upticks in tension, suspense, or revelation. That part’s pretty obvious, right? But also novelists who don’t plot much at all. A writer of impressionistic fiction can indicate the organization of the larger work through the organization of the smaller.
Most of all, readers. Chapters provide us with breaks in the reading. Hey, never discount the dumb stuff. Even when we read straight through huge chunks, those breaks provide moments to consider the implications of what we’ve just read, to see how things are fitting together. Chapters tell us what’s important in the novel, what’s important to the novel. How is it constructed? Does it emphasize revelation or the withholding of information? Does it prize external event or internal impression? Is it tight and coherent or loose and rambling? Chapters help teach us how to read the novel. And we’ll take all the help we can get.