Some of our best fictional stories are in cycles. The "Hero's Journey" is often a circle with growth, where you end up where you started from. Every season of The Wire pretty much ends in a circle.
I'm not saying they aren't, and that all narratives conceived in the west require them, but the Abrahamic (and earlier Zoroastrian) religions developed this sense of there being a definite beginning, middle, and end of everything, and that's not a concept universal to many religions.
