In this article, we shall contribute to the theory of narrative closure. In pre-theoretical terms, a narrative features closure if it has an ending. We start by giving a general introduction into the closure phenomenon. Next, we offer a reconstruction of Noël Carroll’s (2007. Narrative closure

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Some narratives are explanatory, and some explanations are given by narrating. But are there explanations which are explanatorySince the concepts of narrative and explanation are contested, both concepts need to be explicated in order to investigate whether narrative explanations exist. As for explanation, the idea that some narratives are explanatory because they are narratives is often expressed by saying that the narrative form contrib­utes to the explanatory force of the explanation. Unfortunately, the notion of explanatory force is but a rather vague picture. It is not entirely clear what a contribution to explanatory force might consist in. After explicating what counts as an explanation, I therefore propose to substitute the notion of explanatory force by a more precise account. The one that is chosen for the purposes of this paper (but not the only possible choice) is van Fraassen’s account: explanations are seen as at least answers to how-questions or why-questions which are relevant for theMy explication of the notion of narrative already stands in this context. In order to find relevance relations between answers to how/why-questions andIn the main part of the paper, these inherently narrative candidates are then identified in the literature on narrative explanation, and I subsequently ask whether they can provide a relevance relation betweenThe last section of the paper then situates these considerations in their historical contexts, starting with Hempel’s theory of explanation. The question is asked why the idea of a special, narrative type of explanation seemed attractive in the first place. I come up with three tentative answers: the widespread discontent with Hempel’s theory of scientific explanation, the availability of narrative as an obvious but allegedly underrated aspect of explanations, and the availability of a list of candidates for which narrative explanation was supposed to work. None of these historical reasons, however, is ultimately conclusive.

Current theoretical accounts of the telling vs. showing distinction suffer from the incompatibility of several very plausible intuitions. This leads to accounts which seem not even to be addressing the same phenomena. Going back to Lubbock and Genette, we uncover the intuitions in question, show that they are incompatible and propose a unificatory account, which takes a particular type of imagining on the part of reader to lie at the heart of the telling vs. showing distinction.

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