The Crossover Text at a Metamodern Impasse: Analysing the Curious Case of the Closed Ending in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Poststructuralist and postmodernist approaches to narratives consider closed endings to be cognitively regressive. However, as contemporary crossover literature grows in popularity, through them adult readers have also made a controversial return to structurally conservative narratives. Though criticised as readerly, some critics contradictorily justify the return by foregrounding the inherent subversion of adolescence. This interpretative dichotomy which sees narrative structures in crossovers as regressive or subversive shows the inadequacy of postmodernist approaches in explaining the evolved purpose of narrative ends. By analysing Mark Haddon’s crossover novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time as a representative text, a new function of closed structures as en/closures emerges. I contend that these narrative en/closures reflect a consciousness of our spatiotemporal boundedness and symbolise a coping mechanism against the disappointment of postmodern ideals through a psychological stasis or a prolonged impasse. Moreover, they capture the psychodrama of a metamodern “structure of feeling” (Akker and Vermeulen in Metamodernism: historicity, affect, and depth after postmodernism, Rowman & Littlefield International, London & New York, 2017) which reroutes human psyche to pre-postmodern forms, and in doing so, mirrors an active historical dialectics while remaining sceptical of its progressive trajectory. Thus, crossovers through closed-structures capture the adolescent psyche at a juncture where a crossing over between Self and Other seems an impossibility.