There seems to be varying opinions about prologues. Some
readers hate them, won’t even read them. Why? It is part of the story. If the
author had titled it “Chapter 1” instead of “Prologue” they would have read it
without question. I guess it is because people feel that if it is a prologue,
it is not really part of the story and they don’t want to waste their time on
preliminaries. I am sure those same people would not read the
“Acknowledgements” or the “Forward” or the “Afterword” either.
I can understand being anxious to get to the story.
Something made you interested enough to buy or to checkout or to borrow this
book. You want to get to the meat. But the prologue (if there is one) is part
of the story. It often tells us something about a character or a situation that
we may need to know later. It may be there to set the emotional stage for the
story. It is a gem, a kernel of information. Then again, I have read some
prologues that were not all that enlightening or useful to the story. That just
comes down to bad writing. You should not put anything in the story that
doesn’t need to be there.
If the writer is doing their job, the prologue can set the
hook of the reader’s interest. In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, the
prologue is narrated by Death who tells us of the three times he met the main
character. This gives us information about the character and feel of the story, but it also foreshadows what is to come. In Game
of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, the prologue paints a chilling scene
that foreshadow later events and then what happens in the first chapter is a
natural result. Could these stories have survived without the prologues? I
suppose so, with some added exposition, but that would have made the stories
weaker, not stronger. More exposition means telling, not showing.
If you are a writer and you want to add a prologue, by all
means do so. But, like anything else you put into a story, you have to ask
yourself if it really makes the story better. If it does not; don’t do it.
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