Modern narrative-critical readings of the Fourth Gospel have been decisively shaped by R. Alan Culpepper’s Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel, which establishes a model of the text as a carefully constructed narrative system producing coherence through irony, characterization, and implied authorial design. Later developments, particularly in the work of James L. Resseguie, extend this trajectory by emphasizing reader cognition, perception, and the experiential process of meaning-making within the Gospel.

This study positions itself between and against these two interpretive frameworks. While both Culpepper and Resseguie account for complexity, irony, and ambiguity, they ultimately preserve a model in which narrative processes aim toward cognitive, interpretive, or theological coherence. This study argues instead that the Gospel of John is structured by sustained non-closure: a formal principle in which discourse, characterization, focalization, and temporality resist final stabilization. The result is not interpretive failure but a narratively organized refusal of completion.

This study employs a narratological and reader oriented methodology focused on selected Johannine passages in which revelation culminates not in interpretive completion but in sustained epistemological instability. While the narrative critical approaches of R. Alan Culpepper and James L. Resseguie have demonstrated the literary sophistication of the Fourth Gospel and the importance of reader perception within Johannine discourse. 

These methods ultimately preserve a movement toward coherence in which ambiguity and misunderstanding function in service of theological stabilization. Against this trajectory, the present study argues that the Gospel of John is structured through sustained non closure, whereby disclosure and concealment remain inseparable and interpretive certainty is continually deferred. Drawing upon narratology, reader response criticism, and apocalyptic theories of mediated revelation, the study examines how Johannine narration repeatedly destabilizes resolution precisely at those moments where closure appears imminent.