“Closure is not only the ending of a story, but the enclosing of discordant energies and possibilities into a single ideological whole.”
Levine, summarizing T. Eagleton’s position
Levine’s own position attempts to problematize this:
“although we regularly call the formal phenomenon of a novel’s ending its closure, what [a] novel imagines in its conclusion is really not an enclosure at all, but a beginning—the launching of a series of social and political relationships […] that have significance as a model […] precisely because they will endure beyond the narrative’s end. The ending’s political force depends not on resolution and finality, but on repetitions that will extend past the time represented in the text. To call this closure and containment is to overlook the future implied by the text”