Filme do Dia: Der Traum des Bildhauers (1907), Johann Schwarzer

Walter Benjamin has made this point in the simplest and most extreme way, in claiming that what we seek in narrative fictions is that knowledge of death which is denied to us in our own lives (...). Benjamin thus advances the ultimate argument for the necessary retrospectivity of narrative: that only the end can finally determine meaning, close the sentence as a signifying totality.

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot, pp. 22.