Sam Sacks on Frank Kermode | Open Letters Monthly - an Arts and Literature Review: The year is important because the threat of nuclear annihilation lent intense clarity to Kermode’s main point: Humans, personally and collectively, are preoccupied with trying to understand their deaths. For life to have meaning, to amount to more than just a sequence of events, that meaning must be projected backwards from an ending that provides the key to interpreting everything that preceded it.
Fiction mirrors this process. A common complaint of a failed novel is that it just portrays one damn thing after another. But a great work of literature endows its actions with a higher order of consequence that transcends mere chronology and, as Kermode puts it, charges the story with meaning. Endings are not terminations but completions.