摘要：Rather than provide an exhaustive account of John Sayles' 1999 film Limbo, I would like to look closely at the first couple of scenes to convey some of their flavour and complex tone before concentrating on the final stages of the film. I am especially interested in the ending itself, the radical unconventionality of which – breaking off in midstream as it does without any closure or resolution to the narrative – is likely to provoke strong feelings of frustration in its audience, and raises a number of questions central to my concerns with viewer involvement. The film is set in the present-day state of Alaska, with the setting shifting away from everyday society in the latter part of the film and correspondingly darkening its mood. At that stage, Limbowill provide us with a sustained example of embedded narration – a story within a story – when Noelle (Vanessa Martinez) finds a young girl's diary on the island where she is stranded with her mother Donna (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and Donna's new boyfriend, Joe Gastineau (David Strathairn), and reads them extracts every evening. Eventually, when the diary's narration runs out, she devises other stories which retain the original setting and characters in order to deal imaginatively with her own emotional life and family relationships. In contrast, in Limbo's early scenes what we have is more like multiple narration, that is an array of different stories about Alaska existing side by side, rather than being embedded one within another. Of course, they are all ultimately embedded within Sayles' film itself (that is, he is constructing a story about these stories), though only in Noelle's case is he presenting us with a story about her appropriation and continuation of the diarist's stories for personal ends
