Narrative Caption Escalation

Narrative Caption Escalation names a mode in which an Inscrutables caption abandons the single spoken line for paragraph-scale narration that escalates past every natural stopping point, so that the story's refusal to stop becomes part of the joke.

NCE is the structural opposite of Captionless Visual Surplus: where CVS withholds language and lets the image overflow, NCE overproduces language until the narration itself acquires comic mass. The reference implementation is Working Paper No. 49, whose caption declines at least four clean exits — the referral, the disclosure, the diagnosis, the consolation — before stopping on the taste of a rinse.