Ellipsis (narrative device)
Encyclopedia
Ellipsis is the narrative device of omitting a portion of the sequence of events, allowing the reader to fill in the narrative gaps.

An ellipsis in narrative
Narrative
A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...

 leaves out a portion of the story. This can be used to condense time, or as a stylistic method to allow the reader to fill in the missing portions of the narrative with their imagination. Ellipsis has its roots in the modernist works of Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...

 who has pioneered the Iceberg Theory
Iceberg Theory
The Iceberg Theory is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is best known for works such as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea...

, also known as the theory of omission.

A famous example of ellipsis in narrative is offered by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

's novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

, To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A novel set on the Ramsays and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, it skilfully manipulates temporal and psychological elements....

. Between the first and second parts of the novel, many years pass and World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 is fought and won. The reader is left to infer the events that have taken place during the elapsed time by the changes evident in the characters in the novel.

Ellipsis is a common procedure in film
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 narrative, where movement and action unnecessary to the telling of a story will often be removed by editing. For example, there would be no need to show a character standing up from a chair and walking the length of a room to open a door. Instead, the character may be shown standing up from the chair and then in the next cut - normally viewed from a different angle, or with a cutaway shot in between, necessary to smooth over the gap - he would have already crossed the room and be over by the door. Narrative logic allows the viewer to disregard the ellipsis in this case. At the start Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick was an American film director, writer, producer, and photographer who lived in England during most of the last four decades of his career...

's 2001: A Space Odyssey
2001: A Space Odyssey (film)
2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...

the film takes a giant chronological leap as it jumps from the first tool of humankind (a bone) to the latest (a space station). However, in this instance the ellipsis - a match cut
Match cut
A match cut, also called a graphic match, is a cut in film editing between either two different objects, two different spaces, or two different compositions in which an object in the two shots graphically match, often helping to establish a strong continuity of action and linking the two shots...

 in film language - is filled by the metaphorical parallelism between the two objects, visually similar in shape and joined by a deep anthropological significance.

The Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

ese director Yasujiro Ozu
Yasujiro Ozu
was a prominent Japanese film director and script writer. He is known for his distinctive technical style, developed during the silent era. Marriage and family, especially the relationships between the generations, are among the most persistent themes in his body of work...

 is also famous for his use of ellipsis. Important people or events would be omitted in his narration, leaving the audience to infer what has happened through subsequent dialog. For example, in Tokyo Story
Tokyo Story
is a 1953 Japanese film directed by Yasujirō Ozu. It tells the story of an aging couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their grown children. The film contrasts the behavior of their biological children, who are too busy to pay them much attention, and their daughter-in-law, who treats them with...

, the climactic event, the death of the mother, is never shown, only the aftermath reactions.
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