In what lies ahead there is a central claim about the temporality of narrative: namely, that it operates according to a tense structure quite different from the one we normally assume for it. This tense structure is the future perfect, the tense that refers to something that lies ahead and yet which is already complete, not what will happen, but what will have happened. There is a hint of the impossible in the future perfect. It seems to ascribe to the future the one property that it cannot possess, but it will be my claim that this hint of the impossible, of a future that has already taken place, not only offers us an account of narrative temporality, but also tells us something about how we use stories to reconcile what we expect with what we experience, the foreseeable with the unexpected.

The idea of tense structure, in this sense, follows Genette in Narrative Discourse when he says that we should ‘organize, or at any rate formulate, the problems of analyzing narrative discourse according to the categories [i.e. tense, mood, voice] borrowed from the grammar of verbs’ (Genette 1980, 30). Just as the notion of first person narrative voice borrows its analytical concept from the conjugation of the verb, so tense structure can borrow the specific structures of temporal reference from tenses; and just as the notion of first person narrative voice is not in any way pronoun-dependent, so too is a tense structure capable of indifference to the tense forms of actual narrative verbs.