First lines and last lines: how an opening promises what the ending pays

One of the first habits I picked up when I started reading like a writer was a small one. When I finished a novel, I turned back to page one and read the first sentence again, then the last sentence, one after the other, as if they were a couplet. It takes ten seconds. It is the quickest way I know to see what a book promised and what it paid.

The idea is not mine. Anyone who has studied fiction for long has heard that an opening makes a promise. What surprised me, doing this with book after book, was how literally the great novels keep that promise. The last line often uses the same grammar as the first, or the same image, or answers it like the second half of a sentence spoken across four hundred pages.

Here are five classic pairs, read that way, then two modern ones and an exercise you can run on your own draft. The classics are public domain and old enough to discuss openly, endings included.

Pride and Prejudice: the truth and the gratitude

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Darcy, as well as Elizabeth, really loved them; and they were both ever sensible of the warmest gratitude towards the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them.

Austen's first sentence (1813) is a joke in the voice of a neighborhood. It states a "truth" that is really the gossip of mothers with daughters, and the irony is in how grandly it is said. The promise is that the novel will test that truth.

The last sentence pays it off by changing the subject. Fortune and wanting have disappeared. In their place are love and gratitude, directed at the Gardiners, an aunt and uncle in trade who took Elizabeth on a holiday to Derbyshire. The first line is about money and a single man. The last is about a family and a debt of kindness. The novel's argument lives in the distance between them.

A Tale of Two Cities: from "It was" to "It is"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness...

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

Dickens (1859) opens with a run of paired opposites, best and worst, wisdom and foolishness, a whole era that cannot decide what it is. He closes with the words Sydney Carton might have said on the scaffold, which the narrator offers as a prophecy: "If he had given any utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these."

Put them together and the grammar does the work. "It was" becomes "It is." The past tense of history becomes the present tense of a single man's choice. The opening's superlatives, best and worst, give way to comparatives, better and better. An age that was both things at once ends in one man who has decided. That is a promise about doubleness, two cities and two lookalike men, kept by a final act that makes one of them choose.

Moby-Dick: a name and an orphan

Call me Ishmael.

It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.

Melville's first line (1851) is three words and an invitation. It is not "My name is Ishmael." It is a name the narrator asks us to use, and the biblical Ishmael was the son sent out into the wilderness, the outcast. The promise is a voice that will speak to us directly and a man with no settled place.

The last line of the Epilogue, after the Pequod has gone down, pays that promise exactly. Ishmael, floating alone, is picked up by the Rachel, a ship still searching for a lost whaleboat that carried its captain's son, and the book names him at last as what his name implied: "another orphan." The Epilogue's epigraph, from the Book of Job, is "And I only am escaped alone to tell thee," which explains how the voice that said "Call me" survived to say it.

The Great Gatsby: advice and the current

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Fitzgerald's novel (1925) opens with a man looking back. Nick has been "turning over" the past "ever since," and the book is that turning over. The promise is of a narrator haunted by a time he cannot leave.

The ending makes the haunting universal. "Turning over in my mind" becomes "borne back ceaselessly into the past," and "I" becomes "we." Both lines are about the pull of what is behind you. The first is one young man's habit. The last is a whole country's condition, and the reader's too.

Middlemarch: Saint Theresa and the unvisited tombs

Eliot's novel (1871 to 1872) has a Prelude that begins with Saint Theresa, and asks who has not dwelt, at least briefly, on her life. The Prelude goes on to imagine later women with the same ardor and no great outlet for it, women who become "foundress of nothing."

The Finale answers that directly. Its last sentence says that "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts," and closes on those "who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." The promise was a question about wasted greatness. The payment is a claim that the greatness was not wasted, only spread out where history cannot see it. The book opens on a saint everyone remembers and ends on graves nobody visits, and means both as praise.

Two modern pairs, in paraphrase

Spoilers for the endings of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Beloved follow.

Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967, in English 1970) opens many years in the future, with Colonel Aureliano Buendía facing a firing squad and remembering the afternoon his father took him to see ice. The first sentence holds three times at once, a future, a remembering and a distant past, and so promises a book in which time folds back on itself. The ending keeps that promise: the last of the family deciphers old parchments that turn out to tell the family's whole history, and he reads them as a wind wipes the town away. A book that began by looking back from the future ends with the past arriving all at once.

Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) opens with an address and a feeling: "124 was spiteful." A house, by its number, is given a temper. The promise is a haunting. The final chapter turns the haunting into a question of memory, repeating that this was not a story to pass on, and the book ends on a single word, the name Beloved. The opening named a house. The ending names the ghost, which is to say it names the child the house was spiteful about.

Why the pairing works

In every pair above the last line does one of three things to the first:

• It answers it, as Middlemarch's Finale answers its Prelude.
• It revises it, as Austen replaces fortune with gratitude.
• It completes it, as Melville's orphan finishes the thought begun by "Call me Ishmael."

What great last lines rarely do is ignore the first. Even when the connection is buried, it is usually there: a shared tense, a repeated image, a word that comes back changed. My colleague Beatrix has written about the kinds of endings novels choose (seven kinds at her count, and the open and closed question that runs across them), and the pairing test works for every kind. A death ending and a wedding ending can both rhyme with their openings.

Salvatore Scibona's first novel, The End, is a good modern study in this. It begins on the morning of a feast day in 1953, inside the dread of one man, and after decades of backward travel it returns to the same day and closes inside a different mind. Our reader's guide to The End traces how the opening becomes the theme the ending plays back.

An exercise: put your first and last lines side by side

If you have a draft, try this. It takes five minutes and it is often more revealing than a whole read-through.

1. Copy your first sentence and your last sentence onto a blank page, one under the other, with nothing between them.
2. Read them aloud, in that order, as if they were one short poem.
3. Ask whether they share anything: a word, an image, a tense, a person, a rhythm. Underline it if they do.
4. Ask what the last line does to the first. Does it answer, revise or complete it? Or does it simply sit there?
5. Try the swap test. Could your last line end a different novel? If it could end almost any novel ("And life went on"), it is too general.
6. If the pair do not speak to each other, change one of them. In my experience it is more often the first line that is wrong, because it was written before you knew what the book was about.

Here is a pair that passes, from the invented novel Low Water that Desmond used in his piece on writing the last chapter. Suppose the first line is this:

Nell Varga had not set foot in a boat for twenty-six years, and she did not intend to start for the sake of a buyer.

And the last, from his cut version of the ending:

The last light went out over the shed. Nell sat with the oars across her knees and let the boat turn on the water.

Read together, they make the book's shape visible in a breath. The boat refused is now the boat she sits in. The buyer, the business reason for coming home, has vanished from the last line entirely. And the final verb, letting the boat turn, answers the first line's refusal with something close to surrender. You do not need to have read the novel, invented or not, to feel the distance travelled.

That is the test. If someone who has not read your book can read your first and last lines together and feel that something happened between them, the promise has been kept.