Title Drop/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • To Kill a Mockingbird: Heard in a tale Atticus relates over dinner. If it weren't for the use of the Title Drop, his tale would seem unimportant at the time, but it turns out to be a metaphor for one of the major themes.
  • The last five words of the novel The Silence of the Lambs are "the silence of the lambs," in reference to an intense conversation Clarice had earlier on with Lecter about witnessing lambs being slaughtered as a child. In the movie, the conversation appears virtually unchanged, but the words "the silence of the lambs" never specifically come up, leaving some audiences quite confused about what, exactly, the title meant. Lecter does, however, say "Have the lambs stopped screaming?" to Clarice at one point.
  • Every version of Stephen King's The Dead Zone has featured the phrase "the dead zone." However, oddly enough each version ascribes the phrase a different meaning. In the original novel it referred to parts of Johnny's brain which had died during his coma, which became important when he had a crucial vision of the future -- some elements of which he couldn't make out because they were in "the dead zone." In the movie, Johnny explained to another character that his visions of the future were different from his visions of the past or present, in that they had a "dead zone" -- his way of describing a sense that the events weren't solid or fixed, but could be prevented. In the TV series, Johnny's powers stem from the fact that his brain was badly enough damaged during the coma that certain mental functions were re-routed through an area which had up until then been dormant -- a "dead zone."
  • The Pendragon Adventure gets a lot of usage out of this trope, with the title usually relating to the turning point of the territory that has to be saved. It begins in the very first book, The Merchant of Death. Eccentric tradesman Figgis reveals himself to be selling tak, a deadly explosive. The Milago people are constructing it into a bomb as part of La Résistance. Cue Title Drop.
  • In Brave New World, John the Savage replies to Bernard's invitation for him to come and live in the "civilized" world by quoting Miranda's words from the final scene of Shakespeare's Tempest, pausing when he comes to the Title Drop.
    • He later recites the same words (and Title Drop) as an Ironic Echo, after his disillusionment with the values of said "civilized" world.
  • The Sholan Alliance: Lisanne Norman has managed to write the title of each book into the character dialogue or the character's thoughts.
    • It is usually done word for word, but on at least one occasion, paraphrased.
    • For Foreshadowing, book 7's title is dropped in book 6.
  • The book I Am Legend has a very good Title Drop as the very last line. The Movie on the other hand changes the ending completely and thus forces in a very inelegant Title Drop at the very end that doesn't even make grammatical sense (ironically Executive Meddling made them change the ending from something that was similar to the book, but had no such Title Drop).
  • In both The Name of the Wind and The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss, the titles are really well done things from the book.
  • In both of Paul Robinson's books In the Matter of: The Gatekeeper: The Gate Contracts and In the Matter of: Instrument of God, each chapter's title comes from a line of dialog used in that chapter.
  • The events in the fantasy novel, Satyrday take place over the course of the week. Guess which day the climax falls on. No, really.

Matthew (a satyr): "I think today is Satyrday."

  • Neil Gaiman's "A Study In Emerald" has a title drop, when describing the murder scene of an Eldritch Abomination's son.
  • It takes some time for The Catcher in The Rye to mention the proverbial catcher in the rye.
  • Till We Have Faces, by C.S. Lewis, waits until the final chapter to mention the title, making its meaning clear by context.
    • The book's Working Title was actually "Bareface" (the main character goes veiled through most of the book). His editor objected that people would think the book was a western. (Lewis observed that he didn't think that would hurt sales.) So the title was pulled from that line in the last chapter.
    • Also by C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength has this: "No power that is merely earthly," he continued at last, "will serve against the Hideous Strength."
  • Atlas Shrugged has a paraphrase of its title about halfway through, at the climax to one of the many Author Filibusters.
  • An interesting (and awesome) variation: The Star Wars Expanded Universe delivers a Title Drop for one of the films in one of the books, when Admiral Pellaeon says: "Although you may win the occasional battle against us, Vorrik, the Empire will always strike back."
  • A Song of Ice and Fire, both with the series name (though not until the second book) and the individual books A Game of Thrones, A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons.
    • Note that while the title has been briefly mentioned, as of book four it is still not known what it actually is, though a popular theory has been pieced together from context and evidence. Rhaegar Targaryen believed that "the song of ice and fire" was something to do with the Prince Who Was Promised. At first, he thought that the Prince was his son Aegon, but later concluded that he'd been mistaken. This is what led him to seduce Lyanna Stark (Targaryen = fire, Stark = ice), presumably in the hope of fathering a Stark/Targaryen child who would be the Prince Who Was Promised. Since the role of the Prince Who Was Promised is to fight the Others, the title song is the cyclical/prophetic saga of a hero battling against the Others to save mankind.
      • Important detail about the Rhaegar and Lyanna theory: a lot of fans are convinced that not only did Rhaegar and Lyanna have a child together but that that child was Jon Snow.
    • The title drop for A Game of Thrones most famously occurs in one of Ned's chapters in which he confronts Cersei, and is the first title drop in the live action adaption. Cersei famously counters with the phrase, "In the game of thrones, you win or you die." The phrase "game of thrones" is used several times afterwards throughout the rest of the series.
    • The first title drop for A Game of Thrones is by Ser Jorah, of all people, in response to Dany's claim that the common people are praying for Viserys' return to the throne. Interestingly, while all other title drops in the thousands-of-pages-long series indicates the importance of the situation, the very first one belittles the entire thing.

"The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends," Ser Jorah told her. "It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace." He gave a shrug. "They never are."

    • In A Feast for Crows the title drop occurs in Asha's first chapter: "We had one king, then five. Now all I see are crows, squabbling over the corpse of Westeros."
    • In A Dance with Dragons one character says, "Not all men were meant to dance with dragons" about Quentyn Martell after his death.
  • The Avi book "Sometimes I think I Hear My Name" uses itself as the last line spoken.
  • House of Leaves is the title of a book Navidson brings with him on a journey into the labyrinth. It also occurs in one of the supplementary appendices which are connected with the main narrative, as part of a poem.
  • Only Revolutions, in both Sam and Hailey's stories, appears towards the end of the book, as both are vowing to destroy everything because the other one has died.
  • Title Drops occur in many, if not all Discworld books. "The Colour of Magic", "The Light Fantastic", "Thief of Time" and "Thud" is even of the sort that the true title reference is explained later as having been different from the assumed reference, due to the cover (at least on the American printings).
  • In "The Last Olympian", the final book in the Percy Jackson series, the goddess Hestia tells Percy that as the guardian of the hearth, she is the last olympian.
  • Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series takes each of its titles from the text of the book, usually from dialog between characters but occasionally from description; there is also quite often an excerpt from the Prophecies of the Dragon at the beginning or end of the book that does a Title Drop. The individual chapters within the books follow the same trend, though more loosely, often referring to an event or location which is not described in the exact phrasing as the chapter title. The ninth book, Winter's Heart, is in many ways a crux to the entire series, and this is foreshadowed in that the title phrase appears somewhere in almost every book in the series.
  • The title of All Quiet on the Western Front appears on the last page. It's the official report of combat status on the day the narrator dies.
  • The last two words of every Sharpe book except the last two are the title, which often requires some slightly clumsy prose.
  • Happens in every single book of the Sword of Truth series, except for Soul of the Fire (a title which, incidentally, can't really refer to anything in the book. There is a fire spirit, but it's explicitly described as not having a soul). It gest slightly varied, as the Blood of the Fold of the third book were first mentioned in the second, and the last title, Confessor, as it's the title of one of the main characters, had been in common usage in the books since the first one.
  • "They seemed to be staring at the dark, but Their Eyes Were Watching God."
  • PG Wodehouse does this a lot, perhaps because of his musical comedy training. (The musicals he wrote with Guy Bolton tended to drop the title in the last spoken line.)
  • The first book in the Left Behind series gives a Title Drop in advance, as the characters excitedly discuss the formation of a "Tribulation Force".
  • In Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Simon speaks to a "pig's head on a stick" who is referred to by the narrator as "The lord of the flies".
  • Dan Abnett carefully drops titles in most of his Warhammer 40,000 novels. Notably, the Gaunt's Ghosts series and the Eisenhorn books.
  • A Scanner Darkly has this line: "Does a passive infrared scanner...see into me-into us-clearly or darkly?"
  • A great one happens in the short novel/novella They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, where the title is used in the last chapter as an explanation for why the main character shot his depressed girlfriend who couldn't kill herself--he had to put her out of her misery. (Don't worry, not a spoiler, it's the first thing in the book.)
  • The Crying of Lot 49 plays with this. The title is the final line of text, and deliberately makes absolutely no sense until then. It turns out that the 49th lot (property) at an auction is maybe relevent to the mystery, and Oedipa is waiting for that lot to be cried (sold). The book ends just before the crying starts, because Thomas Pynchon likes doing that sort of thing, so we never find out what happens.
  • Iain Banks does this at times in his The Culture series, probably most notably in Use of Weapons, and also in Look to Windward and Matter.
  • Jennifer Government (though you can see it coming from the beginning of the chapter, lessening the impact).
  • I Am The Cheese: The title drop is the first person narrator's comment on the last line ("The cheese stands alone") of the Ironic Nursery Tune he has been humming to himself throughout the novel.
  • From the moment King Solomon starts referring to the Hand of Mercy, it's clear that Helen and Clem aren't just reassembling some old angel bones.
  • Tom Clancy usually puts the title of his novels into the text, usually at a critical point in the story or at the climax.
  • Chapter 25 of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath concludes thusly:

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

  • The Color Purple does it towards the end of the book. It is somewhere in the middle of a long list of small things to be grateful for and enjoy. This philosophical/religious discussion would be totally unremarkable without the Title Drop.
  • Lilies Of The Field has the protagonist quote scripture to try to get the stingy, English-deficient mother superior to pay him for his work.
  • Near the end of The Lord of the Rings Frodo reveals that he's written The War of the Ring and the Fall of the Lord of the Rings.
    • When Frodo also first sees his friends after waking up in Rivendell, Pippin cheers for him and calls him "Frodo, Lord of the Ring!" Gandalf promptly scolds him.
  • The Sherlock Holmes novel A Study in Scarlet. "I might not have gone but for you, and so have missed the finest study I ever came across: a study in scarlet, eh?"
  • In the companion book to the Uglies series, Bogus to Bubbly, which explained many things that were left out of the series, Word of God states that the last word of each book was the name of the next book. Scott Westerfeld says that the first two were unintentional, though.
    • The first two? There are only three books in the series, so the last words of the first two would be the only relevant ones. Unless you're including Extras...
    • More specifically, the last word of "Uglies" is "pretty", the last word of "Pretties" is "special", and the last word of "Specials" is "ugly". Considering Tally's Character Development, these could be considered Arc Words.
      • The last word of "Extras" is "cake." Make of that what you will.
  • The Killer Angels drops its title in response to the "What a piece of work is man...," quote from Hamlet. The movie uses the same structure but is titled Gettysburg.
  • A rather clever example in the original novel A Clockwork Orange; it's the title of one of Frank Alexander's manuscripts, and Alex, upon seeing it, remarks on what a stupid title it is. Later, after being "rehabilitated", he suddenly blurts it out.
  • Stephenie Meyer's Twilight books do this in every single book, making the whole series' titles into an Anvilicious metaphor for Bella's life: ie, when she meets Edward, her life descends into twilight; when he leaves her, her world becomes dark in New Moon; The Volturi/fear eclipse everything else in Eclipse; and Breaking Dawn is when everything is working out all right. In the Swedish editions the title drops are inevitable, since the Swedish title of every book in the series is a quote from said book. The Short Life of Bree Tanner is the only exception; it was translated without any changes.
    • The title drop in Eclipse is more blatant. Bella calls Jacob her personal sun, balancing out the clouds of her depression, but says that she's choosing Edward. Jacob replies that he can handle the clouds, but that he can't fight an Eclipse.
  • "He left my mind intact. I can dream, I can wonder, I can lament. Simply, he has taken his revenge. I have no mouth. And I must scream."
  • Every book of P.C. Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath series drops its title somewhere.
  • Dale Brown does this in some of his books. For example, Fatal Terrain draws its title from The Art of War, which gets quoted not long in.
  • "These were The Lovely Bones that had grown around my absense: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone."
  • The Title Drop in The Name of the Rose is intentionally opaque, showing up only in an untranslated Latin epitaph in the last line in the novel: Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus. This translates roughly to "the ancient rose continues to exist through its name, yet its name is all that remains to us," a line that touches on several of the book's themes.
    • Umberto Eco went on to say that, as a semiologist (a specialist in metaphors and symbols) he'd found that the Rose was the most used of symbols, to the point that it could be used as a symbol of almost *anything*. Meaning that it has become too charged with subtitles to actually mean anything any more. He deliberately chose the title to be the most portentous ever, but to not portent anything in particular. It is a semiotic joke, mister Moreau.
  • Number the Stars has its Title Drop during the fake funeral: Peter reads from Psalm 147, which describes God as "He Who numbers the stars one by one." The protagonist Annemarie looks out the window as he says this, wondering how this is possible considering how many stars she could see.
  • Mercedes Lackey's Reserved For The Cat ends with one.
  • The title question in Agatha Christie's Why Didn't They Ask Evans? is the last thing spoken by the murder victim. The significant title drop doesn't come until near the end, however, when the heroine finds herself asking the very same question.
  • The Quantum Gravity series has three. The first two, Keeping It Real and Selling Out, come in the second book, in talking about what it means to be a demon: Keeping it real and never selling out. The title drop for the series as a whole finally makes sense of the series title.

The ghost glow was gone, but she had been Jone's ship and real enough before her capture by the Fleet's massive quantum gravity, so she hadn't fallen apart yet[.]

Besides, there is a point when the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confused in a word, a mortal word, les misérables; whose fault is it? And then, when the fall is furthest, is that not when charity should be greatest?

  • Mario Vargas Llosa's novel In Praise Of The Stepmother is title-dropped as the title of Alfonso's school paper about his stepmother Lucrecia.
  • In an interesting twist, Ted Dekker names the titles of the first three books of The Circle Series in the form of the last names of three serial killers in some later books. Showdown has Marsuvees Black, Skin has Sterling Red, and House has Barsidious White.
  • The Pale King is mentioned offhand in Chapter 18.
  • The Lord Peter Wimsey short story The Article in Question does it twice in ca ten pages, combining Title Drop with Chekhov's Boomerang. The title is dropped for the first time already in the preamble, where "the article in question" refers to a diamond necklace. The story proper deals with two french jewel thieves. The article in question turns out to be the french definite article, which has different form for male and female. One of the thieves, while impersonating a maid, slips up and uses the male form about himself, which leads to lord Peter solving the case.
  • A Deepness in The Sky: "I have students who are sure most of the stars are just like our sun, only much much younger, and many with worlds just like ours. You want a deepness that endures, a deepness that Spiderkind can depend on? Pedure, there is a deepness in the sky, and it extends forever."
  • Time Scout: The first and third books don't count, as the first, Time Scout names the profession that is the focus of the series and the third, Ripping Time names the period of time that is the focus of the last two books. The third, Wagers of Sin is only dropped in the description on the back cover. The last one, The House That Jack Built is dropped in the epilogue in a rather gratuitous fashion.
  • An Isaac Asimov short story In Poor Taste ends with the main character, who is right, but exiled from his planet nonetheless, hearing form his mother that "what you did was in..." then the shuttle doors close, muffling out the last three words.
  • The Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol aren't souls in the religious sense, they're not immediately mentioned, and it takes even longer for us to learn what's the real purpose of the protagonist buying them up.
  • The Madness Season is the portion of the Tyr life cycle where the Raayat drones gain a sense of individuality apart from the Hive Mind as they prepare to mate with the queen.
  • In Kiss of the Spider Woman from Manuel Puig, Molina recreates movie arguments to his cell mate Valentin to pass time. The first one is about a panther-woman who kills every man who kiss her. Later in the book, after both prisoners start having an affair and Molina is send out free, Molina asks Valentin why he haven't kiss him yet. He answer jokingly that he was afraid he'll became a panther and kill him, like the panther-woman movie, to what Molina replies that he is not a panther-woman. Valentine then say to him: "You are the spider-woman, who catches the men in her web" and Molina says that he likes that. At the end of the book, when Valentin starts having a death dream, the title is dropped again reinforced with the image of the spider-woman when he is talking with Marta.
  • In John C. Wright's Count to a Trillion, Blackie starts making plans at once for a far future danger, on the grounds that even if a man does not have the patience to count to a trillion, still the number exists.
  • Mr. Jaggers says that Pip has "Great Expectations" upon the second time they meet.
  • In Teresa Frohock's Miserere An Autumn Tale, one character says "Miserere" -- have mercy -- as a plea for mercy for himself, and another sends a letter instructing John that a lost sheep is returning, and concludes with it Miserere.
  • In Zero History by William Gibson, Defence Criminal Investigative Service agent Winnie Tung Whittaker is telling Milgrim how little of a trail he has left over the years: "Zero history as far as Choice Point is concerned. Means you haven't even had a credit card for ten years."
  • Played with in Paul Murray's novel An Evening Of Long Goodbyes. About halfway through the book, the narrator character decides to write a play based on the events happening around him. He says he has chosen the title: six words which perfectly capture the sad mood of the situation. The next chapter is the playscript itself, titled There's Bosnians In My Attic! The trope is played straight elsewhere, where "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" is the name of a racing greyhound.
  • In Who Moved My Cheese?, Hem shouts "Who moved my cheese?" after there is no cheese left in Cheese Station C.
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