The Art of the Epigraph

The epigraph is a funny literary convention: excerpting lines of someone else’s work — or quotes, adages, lines of verse, lyrics, snippets of conversation, etc — to put before your own. The effect varies: often the epigraph serves as a sort of thematic gatekeeper, or simply sets the mood for the prose to come, sometimes it gives the reader a glimpse into the author’s intentions or inspirations, or it may serve as a joke or warning. They may seem a trivial part of the work they come attached to, but we think, if done properly, they can be very illuminating are more than mere pontification. 

Writers don’t use them to boast. They are less like some wine and entrée pairing and more like the first lesson in a long class. Writers must teach a reader how to read their book. They must instruct the tone, the pace, the ostensible project of a given work. An epigraph is an opportunity to situate a novel, a story, or an essay, and, more importantly, to orient the reader to the book’s intentions. A good epigraph establishes the theme, but when it works best it does more than this. A theme can be represented in an infinity of ways, so it is the particular selection of quotation that should do the most work. 

Here are some great examples of epigraphs:

"When we are not sure, we are alive." — Graham Greene (from Reality Hunger by David Shields)

"Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten." — G.K. Chesterson (from Coraline by Neil Gaiman)

"Lawyers, I suppose, were children once". — Charles Lamb (from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)

"In the desert there is no sign that says, Thou shalt not eat stones." — Sufi proverb (from The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood)

"Vengeance is mine; I will repay." — Deuteronomy 32:35 (from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy)

"Behind every great fortune there is a crime." — Balzac (from The Godfather by Mario Puzo)

And my personal favorite is the one by Mark Twain:

"NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance." (from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain)

 Of course you can’t write something simply because you’ve found the perfect epigraph, the perfect title, the perfect premise –– there has to be a greater need, a desire that you can’t stymie. Charles Baxter once wrote, “Art that is overcontrolled by its meaning may start to go a bit dead.” The same is true of art overcontrolled by anything other than the inexplicable urge to put story to paper. 

Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years. The unknown element in the lives of other people is like that of nature, which each fresh scientific discovery merely reduces but does not abolish.

Sometimes, though, epigraphs offer a different kind of poignancy Christopher Hitchens’s last collection of essays, Arguably, opens with this:

"Live all you can: It’s a mistake not to."–– Lambert Strether, in The Ambassadors  

Hitchens, by the time Arguably was published, had already been diagnosed with esophageal cancer. He knew he was dying. This epigraph stands as Hitchens’s final assertion of his unwavering worldview. Even more retrospectively moving are the epigraphs of Hitch-22, a memoir he wrote before the doctors told him the news. One of these passages is the wonderful, remarkable opening of Hitchens’s friend Richard Dawkins’s book Unweaving the Rainbow:

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of the Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, who are here."

Epigraphs are, ultimately, like many components of art, in that they can pretty much accomplish anything the writer wants them to. They can support a theme or contradict it. They can prepare readers or mislead them. They can situate a book into its intended company or they can renounce any relationship with the past. And when used effectively, they can be just as vital to a novel’s meaning as the title, the themes, the prose. An epigraph may not make or break a book, but it can certainly enhance its richness. Each new novel, each new story, not only adds to the great well of work, it actually reaches back into the past and changes the static text. It alters how we see the past. The giant conversation of literature knows no restrictions to time or geography, and epigraphs are a big part of it. Writers continuously resurrect the dead, salute the present and, like epigraphs, hint at what’s to come in the future.