Every chapter of this book is, in its own way, about reading beyond return, beneath, around, and outside of the narrative of novelistic renewal in French literature. As we have seen, that narrative is characterized by a strong anti-modernist literary historical vision and a conflicted relationship to genre fiction and popular novelistic forms. That narrative also relies, as all semi-coherent narratives do, on the drawing of a multiplicity of borders, notably linguistic borders (French or francophone literature), geographical borders (France or francophone countries), cultural borders (French as opposed to foreign literature, popular as opposed to elitist fiction), and temporal or historical borders (literary periods, beginnings and endings, pre-histories and post-histories). Return is a powerful metaphor precisely because it is deeply polyvalent, capable of being enlisted for affirmations of ‘good’ artistic eternities and in historicist condemnations of ‘bad’ or violent repetitions, capable of signifying life or death, an ever-renewed encounter with the other or the mortal stasis of the selfsame. In the more limited realm of novelistic narrative, repetition, circularity, and rewriting have frequently been played against what is perceived as the coercive linearity of textual narrative. One of the best ways to understand narrative fiction is indeed to ask how it closes itself, how it positions its beginning and end, how it resists or enlists the finality of an ending. This is as much true of the narratives of the discourse of return as it is of other narratives, and all the authors we have studied thus far conceptualize the ends and end of literature differently. In this chapter, we will examine Volodine, an author whose massive fictional production constitutes an extended reflection on beginnings and endings; on (re)birth and death; on species’ existence and extinction; and, last but not least, on the politics of fictional belonging, on what it means to write in a language, in a national and/ or cultural tradition, in a genre, in the space of a self-contained or an open narrative. Most interestingly, perhaps, Volodine's fiction is written in two mutually exclusive chronotopes, that of an end of history which grounds historical movement in an endless repetition, and that of an apocalypse which wipes away the past and brings it to a point of final extinctive truth.