Endnotes

Literary device

• James Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939) uses footnotes along with left and right marginal notes in Book II Chapter 2. The three types of notes represent comments from the three siblings doing their homework: Shem, Shaun, and Issy.
• J. G. Ballard's "Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown" (1967) is one sentence ("A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles 'Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown,' recalling his wife's murder, his trial and exoneration.") and a series of elaborate footnotes to each one of the words.
• Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000) uses what are arguably some of the most extensive and intricate footnotes in literature. Throughout the novel, footnotes are used to tell several different narratives outside of the main story. The physical orientation of the footnotes on the page also works to reflect the twisted feeling of the plot (often taking up several pages, appearing mirrored from page to page, vertical on either side of the page, or in boxes in the centre of the page, in the middle of the central narrative).
• Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (1967) utilizes extensive and lengthy footnotes for the discussion of a fictional philosopher, de Selby. These footnotes span several pages and often overtake the main plot-line, and add to the absurdist tone of the book.
• David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest includes over 400 endnotes, some over a dozen pages long. Several literary critics suggested that the book be read with two bookmarks. Wallace uses footnotes, endnotes, and in-text notes in much of his other writing as well.
• Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman (originally published in Spanish as El beso de la mujer araña) also makes extensive use of footnotes.
• Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days includes lengthy footnotes and a parallel narrative.
• Mark Dunn's Ibid: A Life is written entirely in endnotes.
• Luis d'Antin van Rooten's Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames (the title is in French, but when pronounced, sounds similar to the English"Mother Goose Rhymes"), in which he is allegedly the editor of a manuscript by the fictional François Charles Fernand d'Antin, contains copious footnotes purporting to help explain the nonsensical French text. The point of the book is that each written French poem sounds like an English nursery rhyme.
• Terry Pratchett has made numerous uses within his novels. The footnotes will often set up running jokes for the rest of the novel.
• B.L.A. and G.B. Gabbler's meta novel The Automation makes uses of footnotes to break the fourth wall. The narrator of the novel, known as "B.L.A.," tells the fantastical story as if true, while the editor, Gabbler, annotates the story through footnotes and thinks the manuscript is only a prose poem attempting to be a literary masterwork.
• Susanna Clarke's 2004 novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell has 185 footnotes, adumbrating fictional events before and after those of the main text, in the same archaic narrative voice, and citing fictional scholarly and magical authorities.
• Jonathan Stroud's The Bartimaeus Trilogy uses footnotes to insert comical remarks and explanations by one of the protagonists, Bartimaeus.
• Michael Gerber's Barry Trotter parody series used footnotes to expand one-line jokes in the text into paragraph-long comedic monologues that would otherwise break the flow of the narrative.
• John Green's An Abundance of Katherines uses footnotes, about which he says: "[They] can allow you to create a kind of secret second narrative, which is important if, say, you're writing a book about what a story is and whether stories are significant."
• Dr Carol Bolton uses extensive footnotes to provide the modern reader with a cipher for a novel about the travels of the fictional Spanish traveller Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, an early 19th-century construct of Robert Southey's, designed to provide him with vehicle to critique the societal habits of the day.
• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series exploits the use of footnotes as a communication device (the footnoterphone) which allows communication between the main character's universe and the fictional bookworld.
• Ernest Hemingway's Natural History of the Dead uses a footnote to further satirize the style of a history while making a sardonic statement about the extinction of "humanists" in modern society.
• Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary follows each brief entry with a footnote (often five or six times the length of the main text) in which saints, historical figures, and other topics are used as examples for philosophical digression. The separate footnotes are designed to contradict each other, and only when multiple footnotes are read together is Bayle's core argument for Fideistic skepticism revealed. This technique was used in part to evade the harsh censorship of 17th-century France.
• Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version uses footnotes as a character device that highlights unreliable passages in the narration. As the editor of his father's autobiography, the narrator's son must correct any of his father's misstated facts. The frequency of these corrections increases as the father falls victim to both hubris and Alzheimer's disease. While most of these changes are minor, a few are essential to plot and character development.
• In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the main plot is told through the annotative endnotes of a fictional editor.
• Bartleby & Co., a novel by Enrique Vila-Matas, is stylized as footnotes to a non-existent novel.
• The works of Jack Vance often have footnotes, detailing and informing the reader of the background of the world in the novel.
• Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) uses both footnotes and margin notes to offer additional commentary and humor.
• Doug Dorst's novel S. uses footnotes to explore the story and relationship of characters V.M. Straka and F.X. Caldeira.
• Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's collaboration, Good Omens, frequently uses footnotes to add humorous asides.
• The short story "The Fifth Fear" in Terena Elizabeth Bell's collectionTell Me What You See uses footnotes to make the science fiction story resemble a historical document.
• Douglas Adams used footnotes frequently in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.