How to express concisely the circular concept of a beginning and future simultaneously?
There are many movies/books which have an ending that is the foundation for the beginning of the story, an example is Terry Pratchett's book Pyramids. In a way these stories become trapped in a repeating circular process.
How can these types of stories be classified?
What term is used for this type of dependency?
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I propose ouroborean story, after the fabled snake Ouroboros, who ends up eating its own tail.
The cinematic or literary device of placing the ending at the beginning of a film or novel is called flash-forward.
It places an ineluctable, fixed point in the viewer's (or reader's) mind.
(To Jubobs's point, this phrase describes the fixed point, but is less about the story classification.)
The TV Tropes jargon for this kind of story is stable time loop. They list Pratchett's Pyramids as an example of the trope. The concept of a stable time loop as ontological paradox is called the bootstrap paradox, after a Robert A. Heinlein story of this nature.
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