Many of the perspectives that we have explored on the difference between narrative and life seem to return to what Ricoeur calls the ‘paradox of emplotment’ which ‘inverts the effect of contingency into an effect of necessity’. It has often been said that narrative somehow banishes chance. Leland Monk says this in his study of chance in the British novel, that ‘chance is that which cannot be represented in narrative’ despite the manifest efforts to do so in the novel of the late Victorian and modern period. Mallarmé, Monk claims, understood that, ‘though a throw of the dice will never do away with chance, narrative will’ (Monk 1993, 9). But the paradox of emplotment is equally catastrophic for the categories of choice and freedom, as Gary Morson argues, even while the efforts to represent free choice have produced some of the most important developments in modern narrative technique. Yet we are perspectivally yoked to people with agency, so that, even if for readers the present is only quasi-present, and the future, by virtue of having been written, is not open, narrative produces a semantic effect of presence in which the activities of desire and intention, action and agency, are shared between readers and narrative participants. We desire, will, plan, resist, hope and fear in a world that is not susceptible to our efforts because we are in the company of participants whose actions, we suppose, have the normal performative effects of bringing the future into being and producing its phenomenal content.