In a well-argued case, the closing argument tracks—and elaborates on—the course set forth in the opening statement, which may be thought of as a "pledge" to the audience (because it takes the form of "the evidence will show"). And it is the most clearly structured and (usually) uninterrupted narrative of the trial. The lawyer delivering the closing is both author (he created the narrative) and narrator (he's commenting on things that happened in the past―both the near past of the trial and the deeper past that the trial testimony ostensibly refers to). In commenting on what has taken place at trial—implying motives and suggesting states of mind that are inherently unknowable—the lawyer's argument, as Wayne Booth says of the novel, "comes into existence as something communicable, and the means of communication are not shameful intrusions unless they are made with shameful ineptitude." Because there is no distance between author and narrator in a closing argument, credibility is paramount, lest he lapse into "unreliable narrator" territory where, as Booth warns, "If he is discovered to be untrustworthy, then the total effect of the work he relays to us is transformed."