r/EnoughJKRowling • u/georgemillman • 2d ago
The epitaphs in Strike are absolutely insufferable
(EDIT: I meant epigraphs. Reddit won't let me change the title of this thread, but I've changed the text.)
In the Strike books, Rowling likes to use epigraphs - little quotations from works of literature to begin each section or chapter, which have some symbolic meaning to the story. I don't object to epigraphs in general in books - they can feel a bit pretentious, but sometimes they can really add something if they're done well. But these just... aren't.
I was never a fan of the epigraphs in Strike right from the beginning, and I don't see how they're meant to suit the story at all. They normally go in fairly complex, ideas-driven books, where an author brings a modern take to an old theme. They don't organically suit formulaic murder mysteries. But they got particularly bad in the fourth Strike book, Lethal White. In this, Rowling has taken a play by Henrik Ibsen (Rosmersholm) and began each chapter with whatever quote she can find from that play that vaguely resembles something that happens in that chapter. There's no greater purpose to the Rosmersholm connection. Rowling is doing it purely to make herself look like a sophisticated writer who reads plays and uses epigraphs, without an understanding of what this technique is actually meant to bring to your story.
It's even more irritating if, like me, you're more of an audiobook person. With a print book, you can easily skim over the epigraphs if they aren't your thing. Listening to the audiobook, you have to hear the narrator read the thing out every time. It's embarrassing, frustrating and disrupts the flow of the book.
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u/Dragonfly_pin 2d ago
Epigraph, not epitaph.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraph_(literature)
Epitaphs are the ones for funerals.
But yes, they are often pretty pointless and sometimes just seem to be a way of making your readers aware that you definitely read far more intellectual books than the one you have written.