A novel opens, "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day." What does the opening require the chapter to explain?

A novel opens, "It is a truth universally acknowledged..." that a rich single man "must be in want of a wife." What does this beginning test?

A narrative begins, "Call me Ishmael." What does that opening establish?

A play opens with the guard's question, "Who's there?" What structural pressure does the first line create?

A novel opens, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." What does the last phrase do?

A novel ends a courtship plot, "Reader, I married him." What is settled, and by what means?

A sonnet ends, "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." What does the ending settle?

A holy sonnet ends, "And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die." How does the ending settle its argument?

An ode closes, "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." How does it seek closure?

After a woman sees her supposedly dead husband alive, the story ends, "...died of heart disease--of the joy that kills." What remains unsettled?

A story ends, "Which came out of the opened door,--the lady, or the tiger?" What does the ending refuse to settle?

A poem ends, "I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." What does the final clause refuse to specify?

After rival natural and supernatural explanations, a novella ends, "...his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped." What is unsettled?

A novel closes, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." How does this reframe the story?

A fable ends with observers looking "from pig to man, and from man to pig" until "it was impossible to say which was which." What is reframed?

After the creature vows to die, the novel ends, "He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance." How is he reframed?

A romance ends with the emblem, "On a field, sable, the letter A, gules." What does the final sentence do to the scarlet letter?

A novel opens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times," and closes, "It is a far, far better thing that I do..." What links them?

A novel opens with "no disaster" accompanying an enterprise and ends with a being "lost in darkness and distance." What structural turn is marked?

A play opens, "Who's there?" and ends, "Go, bid the soldiers shoot." What movement do the first and last lines create?