Throughout this study, we have been concerned with stories as means of expression. I have sought to demonstrate that narratives, like other literary texts, can be communicative tools and ways of developing complex ideas, and that this fact is central to understanding the variety of aesthetic effects they create. But I want to end by considering the limits of this claim. After all, there are certainly moments when the introduction of a narrative element serves to impede communication and not to facilitate it.

Many critics have, for instance, regarded the narrative elements in Robert Browning's poetry as interesting precisely because they prevent straightforward communication. In the ironic effects created in his famous dramatic monologues, it is essential that the reader regard the ideas in Browning's poems not as sincere attempts to articulate a position but as behaviour that reveals the speaker's character – the real topic of the poem. So when for example the speaker in ‘My Last Duchess’ says his wife was ‘too soon made glad / too easily impressed’, we will certainly misunderstand the poem if we treat this as a psychological diagnosis advanced sincerely and which the reader is meant to contemplate. Browning does not mean us to consider whether it is actually possible to be impressed too easily. The point of the poem is rather to use such ideas to characterise the speaker, who has had his wife murdered, and demonstrate the way he has understood and justified his actions.

Such a displaced relation to ideas is characteristic of much of Browning's art, a fact noted by the contemporaries who often urged him to write poetry in his own voice. In fact such friends connected Browning's early unpopularity with his insistence on the ‘dramatic lyric’ and refusal of the tradition of distilling philosophical truth in the Romantic lyric. In that sense refusing to read for the content and recognising Browning's use of ideas as a tool of characterisation is historically sensitive, a way of grasping what the innovative poetic techniques in Browning's work meant in his environment.