"Oh, my Lolita. I have only words to play with!" (Nabokov Lolita 32)

This is the best toy train set a boy ever had!" (Orson Welles, after first touring RKO Studios, quoted in Halliwell 625)

What do these examples and all this analysis imply for narratology in the future study of film as well as other narrative media? I can hardly claim that my conclusions are unique or especially new. However, I do think that they suggest that narratology, if it is to take in the scope of films, television, comics, and electronic and other media, must look beyond the novel or print fiction in general for its own analytic authority. The precedence of the novel was historically inevitable, and the suppleness of narrative elements afforded by language in the purely verbal narrative form of print fiction has allowed for a rich taxonomy and a fine-grained approach to the understanding of narrative. However, as I hope to have demonstrated, the novel can no longer account for, or even stand as the principal model of, all narrative forms in all media. As the quotes above by Nabokov and Welles suggest, we need to be able to account for the specific functions available to narrative in each medium, for the specific elements that empirical creators will "play with" in crafting their narratives. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics and his recent Reinventing Comics suggest some directions that can be taken in the creation and analysis of graphic narratives. Another approach is exemplified by Jeanne Ewert’s recent analysis of Art Spiegelman’s Maus. We are just beginning to come to terms with the implications of new narrative forms in hypertexts, the internet, and computer and video games. Despite its many common elements with film, television drama needs its own focus of attention as well. Whatever their differences, many of the critics I have cited, such as Bordwell, Chatman, Kozloff, Turim, and others, have labored to create a narratology that will honor the unique qualities of film. The cinema, as the first major medium to interpose technology as a source of narration and to combine "telling" and "showing" not just as occasional borrowings but as the dual substance of that medium, provides a likely starting place for any future narratology.