Episodic Narrative

Conan: Blood Of The Serpent.

The text is episodic, I think. At the end of Part Three (of Four), Conan has resolved, or at least for the time being seems to have resolved, a particular conflict. Now he continues his pursuit of Valeria after yet another change of horse. The novel reads as though it could have originally been published as a serial or even as a series of reasonably discrete instalments. Many genre novels were first published in that format so a new novel in the same genre can be constructed with a recognizably similar structure. Conan is moving on. He is not going back. As Poul Anderson's Le Matelot says, "We are on our way."