Super Glossary

Circular Structure

Entertainment / Literature / Circular Structure: A type of artistic structure in which a sense of completeness or closure does not originate in coming to a 'conclusion' that breaks with the earlier story, instead, the sense of closure originates in the way the end of a piece returns to subject-matter, wording, or phrasing found at the beginning of the narrative, play, or poem. An example of circular structure might be 'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,' which ends with an ellipsis identical to the opening sequence, indicating that the middle-aged protagonist is engaging in yet another escapist fantasy. Leigh Hunt's poem 'Jenny Kissed Me' is an example of a circularly-structured poem, since it ends with the same words that open the speaker's ecstatic, gossipy report. Langdon Smith's poem 'Evolution' is circular in its concluding repetition of the opening phrase, 'When you were a tadpole, and I was a fish,' but it is also thematically circular, in that it implies the cycle of reincarnated love will continue again and again in spite of death. In many ways, the smaller tales within a larger frame narrative act as part of a circular structure, because each small tale begins by breaking the reader away from the larger, encompassing narrative and concludes by returning the reader to that larger frame-narrative.
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