October 26, 2017 Life Sentence The Complete Sentence By Jeff Dolven In our new eight-part series, Life Sentence, the literary critic Jeff Dolven will take apart and put back together one beloved or bedeviling sentence every week. Tom Toro will illustrate each sentence Dolven chooses. Image © Tom Toro What is a sentence? But that is such a formal question. How about, what is a sentence for? Less formal, perhaps, but obviously impossible to answer, for sheer variety. There may be some human purposes that don’t find their way into sentences, but writers keep trying, and for any limit we experience there may be a sentence in waiting and a writer to try it. Nonetheless, embarking on what will be a set of eight meditations on the sentence—what it is, what it can be for or about—I’ll propose one purpose that all sentences have in common. The purpose of a sentence is to end. If this is a property of all sentences, any ought to do for an example, but here is one particularly determined to be done with itself: 1 The world is everything that is the case. It comes from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as translated from German into English by C. K. Ogden in 1922. Beginning, as it does, with a capital letter (let’s ignore the number for the moment), and ending with a period, it advertises its own completeness. The completeness is grammatical: there is a subject and a verb, the minimum conditions, then a predicate nominative, and then a simple relative clause. It is also complete rhetorically, with the double “is” almost suggesting a palindrome, folding neatly in the middle. You could just about read it backward as well as forward. That wouldn’t be a good idea logically, but it asserts a certain self-containedness, a certain autonomy, which a sentence is supposed to have. Read More