People are still printing The Travels of Marco Polo, a book whose final paragraph is the author saying "let us now turn our attention to the Black Sea", naming a single mountain, then saying "actually, everybody already knows about that, let's talk about something else" and then THE BOOK FUCKING ENDS.

People are still printing the Odyssey, 10 pages of which is "everything pop culture understands to be the story contained in the poem" and the other 500 pages is Odysseus getting all his friends killed, learning nothing, and then murdering a bunch of his slaves and all the dudes hanging around his wife. The families of these dead men show up for revenge, Athena does a literal deus ex machina, and the story ends.

If I were a much funnier person I would walk this out to some kind of "narrative structure is bourgeois decadence" bit, but I guess I'll just leave it at "apparently no one needed a coherent narrative until the last couple of centuries". 😄