Excipit (closing lines)
Narratology & storytellingA narrative's final lines — the closing note that decides what memory the reader carries away.
Example
A novel that opens in a train station and closes in the same station, seen by a transformed character.
The excipit is the incipit's mirror: a narrative's final lines. It's the note the book closes on — and as in music, the last note retrospectively colors everything before it. The same novel ends differently on an opening door or on a light switched off.
Closing lines often echo the opening: a motif, a place, a sentence transformed by everything that happened in between. That circularity gives the reader the physical sense that the book is finished — not merely stopped.
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