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A prologue or prolog (from Greek πρόλογος prólogos, from πρό pró, "before" and λόγος lógos, "word") is an opening to a story that establishes the context and gives background details, often some earlier story that ties into the main one, and other miscellaneous information.
Born in Spain in the 16th century, the picaresque novel is a type of narrative told in the first person by a lowborn protagonist ("pícaro") in a realistic setting, often with a satiric tone. Plot and character development is limited. Famous examples are Lazarillo de Tormes and Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache.
The opposite is a prologue—a piece of writing at the beginning of a work of literature or drama, usually used to open the story and capture interest. [2] Some genres, for example television programs and video games, call the epilogue an "outro" patterned on the use of "intro" for "introduction".
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
The contrasting three, where only the third has positive value, for example, The Three Little Pigs, two of whose houses are blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. The final or dialectical form of three, where, as with Goldilocks and her bowls of porridge, the first is wrong in one way, the second in an opposite way, and the third is "just right".
[2] [3] One of the most famous opening lines, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times", starts a sentence of 118 words [4] that draws the reader in by its contradiction; the first sentence of the novel, Yes even contains 477 words. Moby-Dick's "Call me Ishmael." is an example of a short opening sentence.
The epigraph may serve as a preface to the work; as a summary; as a counter-example; or as a link from the work to a wider literary canon, [2] with the purpose of either inviting comparison or enlisting a conventional context. [3] A book may have an overall epigraph that is part of the front matter, or one for each chapter.
An example of a "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing Moby-Dick—ideas originally intended to be used later in the ...