Indeterminacy in Literature

[cacian]

Ever read a book and felt that they far too many questions unanswered?
Ambiguity is what comes to mind.
In other words
Is inderteminancy justified as a style in a book or not?
Deos it do justice to a book?

[Kingbob]

Maybe it's a style，like Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter.I think it's justified because the readers can have his or her own opinion or imagination.

[WyattGwyon]

Ever read a book and felt that they far too many questions unanswered?
Ambiguity is what comes to mind.
In other words
Is inderteminancy justified as a style in a book or not?
Deos it do justice to a book?

I have read novels that left many unanswered questions, but what constitutes "too many" is often a tough judgment call. For me your question is not specific enough because there are many kinds of unanswered questions and many categories of indeterminacy.

If you are talking about plot points: Is the source of the indeterminacy information the narrator/author possesses but fails to disclose, or is the book written from the perspective of a narrator/author with incomplete knowledge? Was the point to leave several equally plausible explanations—that is, ambiguous information, or is there simply insufficient information to support any coherent explanation of events? In both of these cases, I would tend to find the first option annoying and the second intriguing.

If you are talking about indeterminacy of motivation: Once again, does the author have a complete conception of the character's inner life which (s)he fails to disclose, or is the point that the author adopts a dialogical stance with respect to the characters, as Dostoyevsky is alleged to have done? (Some have argued, for example, that Dostoyevsky could not explain to himself exactly why Raskolnikov committed his murders and that this is precisely why the character is so convincing.)

Some novels, those of William Gaddis, for example, are written almost like plays for voices, the author giving us what the characters say but providing no other access to their inner lives. This leaves a great deal of indeterminacy but it is a very specific and intentional kind of indeterminacy with great aesthetic rewards.

Anyway, you can see where I am going with this. It would probably help if you gave an example of what you have in mind.

[stlukesguild]

One might just as well invert your question and ask whether a book may leave nothing to the imagination... whether the author might wrap things up far to neatly and top it off with a bow so that we are left with nothing to discuss and no need or desire to ever again visit the work.

I immediately think of the Stanley Kubrick film, 2001:A Space Odyssey. At the close of the film we are left with a slew of questions: Why did HAL go haywire? What actually happened at the end? etc... When Hollywood made the usual sequal they wrapped everything up into a neat package... explained all the ambiguities and as a result left me never wanting to see that film again.

700 years after the fact, readers and scholars are still debating Dante's Comedia. What exactly did the 3 beasts Dante stumbled upon in the dark wood represent? Did Dante imagine a way out of the Elysian Fileds for the virtuous pagans? Etc...

It would seem to me that any book worth reading more than once is a book that leaves something open to the imagination... a book that involves abiguity... a book that rewards a second... and a third... etc... reading because it does not wrap everything up into a neat little package.

[radiantsar]

I think this is a personality preference (http://lightthinker.blog.com/2012/04/09/municipal-jail-a-short-story/) for history (http://thelastmedic.blogetery.com/).

[RicMisc]

It is first of all a very personal thing. I do like a book that leaves questions or at least a lot of ways to interpret it because it gives me pleasure to think about what the writer would have wanted me to think or ask after reading his writings. And the more a books leave to the imagination the more room for discussion there is :)!