Why chapters? Why indeed?

They are not a fashionable subject of literary criticism. They are deep in thestructure of most prose works, doing much of the supporting and some of the embellishing, which is why they deserve some attention. In fact, an awful lotmore attention than they have had.

European languages agree in their metaphones, chapter, chapitre, kapitel, from Latincapite, head. So, chapters don’t in fact refer to girders, or supporting walls,or partitions, but point to the heading of the chapter, and are extended to matamericallyto the whole. But perhaps in addition, each chapter has a head, a mind of its own, and develops its own set of thoughts.

Chapters have a long history, but not quite as long as written literature. The Iliad andOdyssey are supposed to have been divided into their 24 books of piece, about200 years before Christ. The subdivision of the books of the Bible was morecomplicated.

Cervanteshas used chapters in his 1605 novel Don Quixote. And most novels have used themever since. But why?

标题，值得学术界更多的关注与研究。拉丁语系里，chapter是头的意思。从荷马史诗开始就有把书分部分，标题的历史很悠久。从塞万提斯开始，小说的标题有了普遍的应用。

Chaptertwo, resting places.

There can be points to stop and take stock for what has been read, and if one isinclined to reflect on whatever else it might be the chapters are there for.Henry Fielding at the opening of the second book of his novel, Joseph Aandrews,spends an entire chapter doing just that. The narrator comments:

It becomes an author generally to dividea book,as it does a butcher to joint his meat for such an assistance is of great help to both the reader and the carver.One of the more trivial formsof this assistance is that the chapter, quote, prevents spoiling the beauty ofa book by turning down its leaves, a method otherwise necessary to thosereaders who though they read with great improvement and advantage are apt, whenthey return to their study after half-an-hour’s absence, to forget where theyleft off. And then with typically memorable whimsy, he develops a metaphor.

Quotationtwo:

Those little spaces between our chapters may be looked upon as an inn or a resting-place where the reader may stop and take a glass or any other refreshment as it pleases him. Nay,our fine readers will, perhaps, be scare able to travel farther than throughone of them in d day. ……I would not advise him to travel through these pagestoo fast; for if he doth, he may probably miss the seeing some curiousproductions of nature, which will be observed by the slower and more accuratereaders.

Fielding says that a volume without any such places of rest resembles the openings ofwilds or seas which tires the eye and fatigues the spirit when embarked upon. Hiscomments supplied two centuries before the event to those modernist novelswhich were written without chapter breaks any more visible than a small widegap.

If the chapter is numbered, then it as though the inns have in front of them stones indicating the number of miles that I have travelled. And if I have consultedthe contents pages’s map, then I know how many I still have to go through tillthe end.

In most novels, chapters are so numerous and closely linked that they perhaps,most of all,resemble the paragraphs of which the prose is composed which may have different lengths and shapes, but necessarily follow from one to thenext. Indeed, some of the chapters of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse are actuallyone paragraph long, and a chapter can hardly be shorter than that.

在小说中，分部分与标题有着停顿休息的作用，如同旅行中的客栈，否则小说就会变成无穷无尽的海洋、森林。

Chapter three, naming of parts.

Youcan do several things in an inn, you can get information from the landlordabout the road. I am referring here to chapter titles which give, in somecases, considerable detail ofwhat is tocome. In fact, such detailed titles sometimes fail to mention the chapter’smost decisive events whereas some short titles give away a considerable amount.For people who have already read the novel which put chapter names on the content page, they serve the extremely helpful function of helping them torelocate passages. If you bother to look at contents pages, you can often, as afirst-time reader, learn quite a lot about the novel as a whole. But of course,many chapters have no names at all, only numbers. Before the 20thcentury, this was relatively rare.

对于初读小说和再读小说的读者来说，标题的作用和含义会有不同。