Epilogue: The Lagniappe of Prose

You’re sitting in an eatery in the Garden District in New Orleans, patting your belly after a fine meal of jambalaya, enjoying coffee and a beignet. If you’re easy-going, the cook might just add another beignet. A little something extra, no charge. Lagniappe, they call it.

Feeling generous, you transfer that experience to your writing and throw in a little lagniappe at the end of your new novel. You add an epilogue.

Don’t expect your editor to react with the same gratitude you did. It’s out of style, she tells you.

I sometimes see writers and editors weighing in on the evils of epilogues. I don’t get it. The epilogue is a literary device, and neither good nor bad as a concept. All that should matter is whether its use is good writing or bad writing. Or, more accurately, whether or not it adds value to a story.

The Oxford Dictionary defines epilogue as: A section at the end of a book or play which comments on what has happened.

Merriam-Webster differs a bit. An epilogue is 1: a concluding section that rounds out the design of a literary work; 2a: a speech often in verse addressed to the audience by an actor at the end of a play. Also: the actor speaking such an epilogue; 2b: the final scene of a play that comments on or summarizes the main action.

So even between dictionary giants there are slight differences in meaning. I lean towards Merriam-Webster’s, but neither definition fully conveys what we think of as an epilogue in prose fiction.

Some writers confuse epilogue with denouement, using the terms interchangeably, as if they’re the same thing. They’re not.

Denouement is in most cases a necessary part of the story. In the classic story arc, you reach the climax and follow it with the denouement, which sums up the story, squares it away, puts it to bed. Sometimes the denouement takes a few sentences, sometimes a chapter or more.

Epilogue, on the other hand, is unnecessary. It takes place after the denouement, after the essential story is complete. I suspect this unnecessariness is why some detest the idea. But sometimes it’s tasty. It’s lagniappe. Something extra.

Raiders of the Lost Ark illustrates these three ending parts. The face-melting in the desert is the climax. The argument with the Washington bureaucrats and Indy’s happy exit with Myriam is denouement. The story is complete at that point. But we get more, an epilogue in the crating and carting and depositing of the Ark within a vast warehouse of other top secret artifacts, to be forgotten and lost. The warehouse scene is totally unnecessary, but that doesn’t make it bad. It’s damned good.

Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle (1978) builds to a nail-biter of a climax and settles into a relieved exhale of denouement. Then we’re treated to an epilogue that takes place decades later. Two protagonists that don’t even meet until the climax are now happily married with kids. It wasn’t a vital summation of the novel, but it doesn’t feel at all like a tack-on or an indulgence. In fact, it satisfies like an extra dollop of gumbo. The evil epilogue didn’t stop the novel from becoming a blockbuster.

Don’t always listen to conventional wisdom or follow the current style. They sometimes turn out to be simple matters of taste or fads with mayfly lifespans. Got an epilogue you’re in love with and dying to use? Don’t let naysayers talk you out of it simply because they’ve heard epilogues don’t work. Leave it out only if it doesn’t add value to the story.

Bring the lagniappe.

Just for fun and a little lagniappe, here’s Indy and Myriam: