Unreveals in Literature.
General examples:
- 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea:
- Aronnax never discovers Captain Nemo’s true name nor nationality.
- Aronnax writes the last chapter of his book in South Norway. Any form of Travel between upper Norway and the south is limited, and thus he still hasn’t discovered what was the nationality of the ship Captain Nemo sank.
- Aronnax faints after he hits his head against the Nautilus, and apparently he never asked Ned and Conseil how they escaped from the Maelstrom.
- Isaac Asimov's Evidence: Stephen Byerley is suspected of being a robot, but the book never definitely answers the question. According to the collection, I, Robot, he avoided leaving evidence to prove one way or the other even after he died. Dr Calvin believes that he was a robot, which is no different from her saying he was a fundamentally good person.
- In Glen Cook's The Black Company series, the vast majority of characters are Only Known by Their Nickname, for various reasons (Wizards can have their powers stolen by the invocation of their true name, and members of the Black Company symbolically leave their old lives, including their names, behind when they join up). In the fourth book, Croaker, the narrator, is asked what his real name is. He notes that it takes him a moment to remember it. He does not note what it is.
- Torak's father's name in The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. Due to plot-related reasons, it appeared that it was going to be revealed in Ghost Hunter... but instead we just get something along the lines of Torak hearing his father's name, with the reader never finding out.
- This affects both the protagonist and antagonist of The Chronicles of Prydain. Taran, the protagonist, is an orphan with no family linage in a land where familial descent is everything. It starts weighing on him so much he eventually goes Gene Hunting, but comes up empty. It's finally revealed that even his mentor, Big Good Dallben, has no idea who his real parents are (it had been alluded to previously that Dallben was keeping the information secret, but that turns out to be nothing but unfounded speculation on Taran's part). Meanwhile, Arawn, the antagonist, is notable for being a shapeshifter. One of the key facts of his villain mythology is that only one person has ever seen his true face and lived to tell the tale, setting up a Chekhov's Gun regarding his true appearance. When he's finally defeated, he reverts to his true form, which falls face-down on the ground, but because he's a Load-Bearing Boss, his fortress begins to crumble just as Taran goes to turn him over and see his true face.
- The Empirium Trilogy: The name of the angel that took over Ludivine's body is never stated. Corien even tries to say it at one point but gets cut off by Rielle before he can.
- Harry Potter:
- While the reader learns that a Horcrux is made through killing, which “rips apart the soul,” the actual process of creating a Horcrux is left unknown, despite there being books on the subject. J.K. knows but refuses to go into it (even on Pottermore) saying “some things are best left unsaid”.
- Similarly Voldemort’s Rudimentary body potion i.e how he gained his corporal albeit grotesque baby form in The Goblet of Fire after being destroyed, is never disclosed. We know some of the ingredients, Unicorn blood and Nagini‘s venom, but there are clearly other steps which, like Horcruxes, are left in the dark. J.K told her editor who looked like she was going to throw up after hearing it.
- Boggart’s true form, we know it has one, as it rattles around in whatever space it occupies but according to Lupin nobody has ever seen their true form as will instantly change into whatever the viewer fears. In The Order of the Phoenix Mad Eye Moody at one point uses his Magic Eye to spot a Boggart in a desk implying he’s seen its real form but Moody gives no description.
- Was Ariana Dumbledore killed by one of her brothers or Grindelwald? Harry thinks about asking if anyone had ever managed to find out but ultimately decides it’s not his business.
- At the end of Cold Comfort Farm, Ada Doom explains to Flora Poste the wrong that Amos did her father, and what her "rights" are, but the reader never finds out. Flora follows up with "and did the goat die?", but not even she finds out the answer to that. And we never discover what "something nasty in the woodshed" Aunt Ada saw.
- Subverted in Danny, the Champion of the World: Danny's father makes a big deal of the big secret to poaching pheasants. The big secret is that pheasants are completely nuts about raisins. Danny is a bit disappointed that this seemingly trivial tidbit of information is the big secret... but the rest of the book showcases exactly how powerful that little tidbit is in the hands of a sufficiently motivated and creative poacher.
- Deryni: In The Quest for Saint Camber, after an apparition appears to Kelson during his duel with Conall and does a Godly Sidestep, Kelson and Dhugal meet a cowled man on the beach near Castle Coroth. The man still won't give his name or admit appearing to Duncan years before, but he does draw a sigil in the sand that shows them a vision of Camber on his bier. Though there's no clue as to where or when the vision actually happened, Kelson finds a tiny shiral crystal bead (like those sewn into Camber's netted shroud) in the sand.
- Older Than Radio: The opening to Frank Stockton's "The Discourager of Hesitancy", the sequel to "The Lady or the Tiger", is set up with the apparent intention of finally revealing what happened in the No Ending of the previous work. Instead it presents a similar problem without answering what happened in the last one.
- Doctrine of Labyrinths has a couple of these. Is Stephen able to rescue Hallam? Why was the Khloidanikos created? We'll never know.
- Effi Briest:
- The author repeatedly evades revealing details of the story of the ghost of the Chinese man. In one scene, Rosawitha sits down with Frau Kruse and asks her to tell the story; as Frau Kruse begins to speak, the narration follows another character out into the courtyard, then Rosawitha comes into the courtyard and says, "I must say that story about the Chinaman is very queer."
- Later, one character asks another about it, and gets the answer, "An extraordinary story, but not for now. We've other things on our minds." That's it! The reader never learns more.
- Stephen Carter's The Emperor of Ocean Park ends this way. After protagonist Talcott Garland almost died twice in the book trying to figure out the conspiracy that might have been responsible for his father's death, he obtains a floppy disc that contains the names of corrupt Supreme Court members (keep in mind that the book takes place during the late 1990s). Instead of looking inside the floppy disc, or even storing the device for later use, he simply tosses it into the fireplace to be destroyed. Depending on the reader's perspective, this is either a poignant metaphor for letting the past go to move on with your life, or a frustrating cop-out ending after teasing readers for 600+ pages, which ultimately goes nowhere.
- In The Final Reflection, the Klingon protagonist's love interest suffers from social stigma because she's only half-Klingon and doesn't know what the other half is; this is also a problem because it complicates medical treatment and rules out having viable offspring. Near the end of the novel, they manage to find out the details of her ancestry, but the details are not shared with the reader.
- The Brothers Grimm story "The Golden Key" describes a boy who discovers a golden key and a small box in the snow. The boy imagines what wondrous things might be in the box, and searches it for a keyhole. He finally finds it, and inserts the key into the keyhole... but the reader will have to wait for him to unlock the box before finding out what's inside. The end.
- Considering most Grimm stories can be read in an entirely different way, guess what Key and Keyhole could symbolize.
- Fun Jungle: In Lion Down, the pickup truck of one suspect is registered to a woman named Cassie Martinez, who is obviously not the male driver. Teddy and the others speculate what kind of relationship Cassie and the driver may have (siblings, spouses, boyfriend-girlfriend, or just platonic friends), but this is never revealed, even after they find the person who was driving the pickup on the night of the crime.
- The Gossip Girl novels never reveal who the titular Gossip Girl is. The way the final chapters are set up heavily implies that it's one of the main characters, but we don't find out which one.
- In Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar novels (Thus Was Adonis Murdered, The Shortest Way to Hades, The Sirens Sang of Murder and The Sibyl in her Grave), narrated by Professor Hilary Tamar, Hilary's sex is never indicated.
- In James P. Blaylock's Homunculus, a strange mechanical gadget called a Marseilles Pinkle is left at the site of a kidnapping. A worldly character implies that it has some perverse erotic function, but the viewpoint-character is too naive even to guess what that might be, and the Pinkle's description certainly doesn't sound like a sex toy, leaving the reader in the dark as well.
- The Hottest Dishes Of The Tartar Cuisine: The identity of Aminat's father is never revealed.
- House of the Scorpion is set sometime in the future, but the exact year is never revealed. Matt reads a book that would have at least given a rough estimate, but he stops reading the book just before it says what year the book's author received a Nobel Peace Prize.
- The Hunger Games: It is never stated if Portia is on the rebels' side or not.
- In Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos saga, we never get a full explanation of The Shrike's true origin and purpose. In fact, a lot of things are left less than fully explained in the end.
- In Invisible Man, when the protagonist is lying in the hospital and is asked what his name is, he narrates that he realized then he no longer knew his own name. When he later gets a new name from the Brotherhood handed to him on a slip of paper, he avoids stating exactly what name was written on it.
- The short story "The Lady, or the Tiger?" ends with the 'defendant' opening the door his princess lover indicates. We know that she knows what is behind which door, and that she doesn't want to give him to the lady any more than she wants to give him to the tiger, but ultimately the reader has to decide what came out of that door.
- In Donna Tartt's The Little Friend it's never revealed who killed Robin. Throughout most of the book, Harriet was certain who had done it only to realise at the very end that she had absolutely no reason to trust her theory (due to lack of evidence) and that she was utterly wrong anyway.
- Malazan Book of the Fallen: In Reaper's Gale, Rhulad's consort writes a single phrase on a confession paper before she is brutally murdered. Based on the reaction of the two men to subsequently read it, the phrase would have been truly damning to her murderers, which could mean a wide array of things considering their actions. Yet what was written is never revealed; the paper itself is destroyed and both men to read it die without ever revealing the contents.
- In Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon, the identities and blackmail-worthy offenses (if any) of two people on a blackmailer's coded list of potential victims, the Space Cadet and the Emperor, are never identified. Meg thinks that one of them might be her brother Rob, but she also makes a wrong guess about who one of the other code names refers to.
- Lord of the Wings never does explain how and why William Henry Harrison Brimfield, a wealthy heir and idealistic early WWI volunteer, became Billy Pratherton, the most ruthless bootlegger in Caerphilly County, or how or why he and/or his family faked his death in the war and kept the rest of the small town from recognizing him after his return as Pratherton.
- The Falcon Always Wings Twice features a murdered blackmailer but never explains how he got his hands on his blackmail material, with his victim ignoring Meg when she asks that.
- Near the end of the second book in The Millennium Trilogy, Lisbeth Salander figures out a simpler proof for Fermat's Last Theorem. In the third book, thanks to being shot in the head, she no longer remembers what it was.
- In Neuromancer, the character Molly has mirrored sunglass lenses surgically embedded over her eyes. Late in the novel, one of the lenses is broken in a fight, and the characters responsible comment that they'll be able to see the colour of her eyes once she wakes up. They do, but by the time the main character (and thus the reader) get there, she's already been bandaged up.
- Oddly Enough: The contents of the titular item in "The Box" are never revealed. All Michael's told is that it will change the world, like Michael himself has.
- Parker: The name of the amateur who soured Parker's score in The Seventh. The police discover his identity, and at several points the reader almost learns his name, but something always interrupts the action before it is revealed on the page. The novel ends without the reader (or Parker) ever learning who he actually was.
- In The Plot Against America there is never a definitive answer given as to what happened to Charles Lindbergh that caused him to crash his plane. Was it a legitimate crash or did someone sabotage the plane? If it’s the latter, who did it? Was it the British desperate for an American president who will help them? Was it the Nazis because he wasn’t doing enough? The FBI because they thought he’d enter the war on side the Axis powers? These are all ideas presented in the book without an answer.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events. Hundreds of plot points are unexplained, after the readers are informed of just how incomprehensible everything is if you don't know what they mean.
- "The Sugar Bowl" could easily be this trope's name. It is spontaneously revealed that it is very important for some reason during the 10th book, and despite being the MacGuffin for books 11 and 12, we never find out what the sugar bowl contains!
- Lemony Snicket sometimes takes the above plot points to an extreme of this trope, resulting in a chapter beginning that is poorly related (if ever excused by that) to the following chapter.
- When Sir is in a sauna, he puts down the cigar whose smoke usually covers his face, but he is covered up again by the steam. In the illustration at the end of the fourth book, we can kind-of see the back of his head, so he may be bald.
- One of the most prominent examples is, did Count Olaf really burn down the Baudelaire mansion? While he certainly has a motive and it wouldn't be out of character for him to do so, and he doesn't seem surprised when the Baudelaires directly accuse him of doing so, we never get a definite answer or any solid evidence one way or the other. Even Olaf's comments on the matter don't clear anything up. When accused, he just says, "Is that what you think?" It's implied that he may actually have been innocent on that front, although there are also hints in ancillary material (such as the footnotes of the Rare Edition of the first book) that Olaf was present at the Mansion that day, whether or not he set the fire. However, we'll never know for sure — and neither will Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, probably.
- Who was the mention of a "survivor of the fire" on the Snicket File referring to? Although Quigley Quagmire believes (or at least, claims to believe) that it must have been him, and the File was referring to the Quagmire fire, there is strong evidence that the message actually referred to a survivor of the Baudelaire fire — or at least, to someone else than Quigley. Even then, however, the question remains of who the survivor was (one of the Baudelaire parents? Olaf? someone else entirely?), what happened to them, and whether the message was even correct.
- Shades of Magic: In the final book, Kell obtains a note with his birth parents' identities — information that had been erased from his mind, and which he'd wondered about ever since. He ultimately chooses not to read it, deciding that he doesn't want to go hunting for the people who abandoned him.
- Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: Collateral Damage reveals that Elias Cummings never wanted the job as FBI director, but he was blackmailed into taking the job. It is never revealed what he was being blackmailed over, but Judge Cornelia "Nellie" Easter knows what it was, and states she would have done the same thing in his place. Perhaps he committed an act of justifiable murder.
- A Song of Ice and Fire has a subversion in A Feast for Crows. The prologue character Pate asks the hooded person that bribed him to commit thievery to reveal his face, and the man obliges. Pate realizes that he doesn't recognize him at all, and the man is not identified. However, astute readers have picked up that his description matches that of another character briefly described two books earlier to make the connection.
- In Spinning Silver, the Staryk King is outraged when Miryem asks his name, not knowing that Staryk can be bound by it, and for the entire book he is referred to only as the Staryk, the King, or the Staryk King. He does finally tell her when he converts to Judaism and marries her in the tradition of her people, with a name signed on a wedding contract. But she cheekily informs the reader that she's not going to tell you what it is.
- Star Wars Legends:
- In Galaxy of Fear: Clones, Tash stumbles upon a cloning facility that can snag a genetic sample and make a grown clone out of it within hours, when all cloning methods she knows about take years to do the same. There are a few ancient droids running the facility, and she asks one about it... and it tells her that it's classified. Later she speculates, but can't come to any good conclusions.
- The tie-in book The Jedi Path has a three-page essay on the Chosen One prophecy, only the pages are, depending on the edition, torn out or completely marked through, with a note from Luke saying basically, "It was like this when I found it, probably Palpatine's doing."
- The Thinking Machine: In "The Problem of Cell 13", Van Dusen asserts that he had at least two other methods of escaping from the cell if his first plan proved unviable (and his first plan relied on facts he did not know before entering the cell). The reader never learns what these other plans were.
- In the Warhammer 40,000 novel Ahriman: Unchanged, the Changeling of Tzeentch shows its true face to Ahriman after being commanded to spare him. Ahriman is shocked by what he sees, but the Changeling erases his memory of the encounter and disappears before its face can be described.
- Subverted in The Westing Game. During the reading of the will, Sandy McSouthers makes a joke, cutting off the lawyer before the last word in one of the sections is read. Later it's "revealed" that there was no final word in that section. This is ultimately subverted in the end, as one of the characters figures out what the missing word was.
- The Witches:
- The child protagonist who narrates the story goes unnamed throughout the book. We know that he has one, (he says, "I heard my grandmother calling my name," at one point), but he never gets around to telling the reader what it is. While the 1990 film adaptation gave him the name Luke, the 2020 version left it a mystery, and even included a scene where Bruno Jenkins asks for his name, but then cuts him off before he can answer.
- A truly unsettling example comes from Grandma’s encounter with a Witch as a girl. When her grandson questions her about it, Grandma despite recounting multiple terrifying cases of Witches cursing children to him, claims it’s simply too horrible to talk about. When the boy asks whether it has something to do with her missing thumb, Grandma who otherwise has Nerves of Steel clams up completely and the protagonist goes to bed. We never learn what happened to her, how she lost her thumb and how she escaped from (presumably) the Witch with her life. The boy himself imagines it was pulled off like a tooth or shoved in a kettle spout and steamed away. This turn causes the reader to come up with their own even more nasty conclusions.
- In the Xanth novels, Bink's talent (immunity from magical harm) invokes this trope as part its power. Even if Bink himself tries to tell someone, his talent will intervene and cause an interruption. The talent only works if it remains secret; an enemy who knew about it could simply use a non-magical attack. Magic is so common and easy in Xanth that an unaware enemy would never think to try this.
- In The Lies of Locke Lamora, Locke whiskers his true name to Jean. The reader learns only that it's five syllables. And that Jean agrees that it's not as good as "Locke Lamora."
End of Book Cutoff:
- Nightside: In Just Another Judgement Day, John Taylor and a companion barely manage to outmaneuver a homicidal tyranosaur, in order to reach a secret door inside its cage. After meeting the occupant, they're booted out into the cage, where the tyranosaur awaits. Confronting this peril, John (the narrator) simply comments "Luckily, I thought of something", after which the author cuts to the next chapter, leaving their method of escape unstated.
- Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next: In One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, how Thursday escaped Fan Fic. She even tells another character — but not the reader.
