In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode (2000) argued that we experience time as extended from a beginning through middle towards an end. Moreover, it is this “sense of an ending” that makes temporal reality meaningful, transforming what would otherwise be mere sequence into a meaningful and coherent narrative. (See also Ricoeur, 1981.)

The ending towards which one moves, however, is always fictional; it is we who impose organization on what would otherwise be sheer chronicity (Kermode, 2000). (This insight is beautifully embodied in Julian Barnes’s [2012] novel, The Sense of An Ending.) Kermode’s (2000) primary examples of fictions that offer the allure of beginning, middle, and end are apocalyptic thinking and novels. However, he illustrated the idea most keenly in a tiny example:

Let us use a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it says: and we agree it says tick-tock. By this fiction, we humanize it, make it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock is our word for an end. We say they differ. What enables them to be different is a special kind of middle. We can perceive a duration only when it is organized. . . . The fact that we call the second of the two related soundstock is evidence that we use fictions to enable the end to confer organization and form on the temporal structure (p. 44-45).

It is this lack of an “ending”—the lack of a “tock,” as it were—that, according to Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2007), differentiates blogs from other kinds of life-stories, such as autobiographies or memoirs. Blogs, according to Fitzpatrick (2007) evade the “pressure toward coherence, toward rationality, toward teleology” that characterizes memoirs (or autobiographies or novels) (p. 181).

A novel, such as Clarissa, has “a sense of an ending,” one that is as extended and complete as any reader could imagine. Similarly, Clarissa’s life has a sense of an ending, as in the final volumes, where she prepares for her death and her eventual ascendance to heaven. But blogs generally do not end in this way. They stop—sometimes announced, sometimes not; sometimes temporarily, sometimes for good. Of course, the person writing the blog continues, but does the blogging self?

Fitzpatrick (2007) argued that blogs ask us to reimagine “the ways that character emerges not out of a coherent narrative through-line, but out of the myriad interconnections of the quotidian” (p. 181). But surely these myriad quotidian interconnections contribute to a narrative—one in which the blogger has selected and connected the data of the quotidian and made them into something that has a shape. (Even as Wallace Stevens [1954], in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” talks of the “blessed rage for order” by which we organize the stars of the sky into humanly meaningful constellations.) Though the blog itself may lack an “ending,” it nevertheless offers a site where the quotidian can become this day or this set of events or this blog post (with its own beginning, middle, and end). And though the blog itself does not (usually) have an ending, it nevertheless reflects the story of a self who is situated in the kind of temporality that is made humanly meaningful through narrative.