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I'm writing this a few days before the final episode of "The Sopranos." What will happen to Tony, the New Jersey crime boss and family man? Who knows? We'll all find out Sunday night.

In anticipation, I've been reading commentaries on the HBO series, including one by Rob Sheffield in the June 14 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. I'm less interested here with the content of his essay, titled "Ciao, Tony," and more interested in the structure of the piece, which is sometimes call a "ring" or "circle" form.

One of the most transparent examples of this form is the Hermann Hesse novel "Siddhartha." In short, the young protagonist sets out from home, has a series of encounters and struggles on his journey, meets the Buddha, then finds, with a new vision, his path back home. Leave home. Return home. A circle.

Here's the lead to Sheffield's essay, referring to a famous episode in which a Russian thug escapes from the New Jersey gangsters by running through a snowy forest:

The Russian is still out there. He's never coming back, shivering in the pines, where the sun never shines, probably still planning his vengeance against the mobster whose shoe he ate for dinner that snowy night six years ago. Any other show would have brought back the Russian sooner or later, bringing the revenge story full circle. But not "The Sopranos" ...

Six long paragraphs, thick with analysis, follow and resolve themselves with this ending:

The show has always been traumatic to watch, less for the bloodshed than for the emotional violence. But there isn't anything about this show I won't miss. Great writing. ... The music. The casting. The food. And the Russian, always the specter of the Russian, hiding on the edge of every scene, waiting for a nice clean shot that never comes.

Journalism, we know, is front-loaded. I've read a million stories that begin with a great paragraph or two and then decline into insignificance, as if the writer were telling readers: "Hey, suckers, here's the rest of the crap in my notebook."

The value of coming full circle is twofold: It brings the story to a nice, tight close, like shutting the lid of a jewelry box; and, it reminds readers of that important stuff you planted in the lead.

Can you think of examples of this structure from film, literature or journalism? Have you ever used it in a story?

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