Taking Note #3: Endings
‘As humans, we want answers and we seek out certainty; we remove room for anxiety, and map out our futures. We seek perfection and resolution rather than being present in the messiness and uncertainty of it all. Is it not plausible that that is reflected in our attitude towards endings?’
As our blissfully long Easter weekend comes to a close, our Spring Issue title - Resolution - alongside our musings on resolve and determination, prompted thinking about one other kind of resolution – endings.
Our Guest Editor, Priscilla Morris, wrote in her essay on Resolution, ‘Literary resolutions, at least in the Western, Aristotelean tradition, demand that the central conflict is resolved, loose ends tied up and matters explained. Good war fiction, however, in my experience, resists too much neatness or closure. There may be the sense that the resolution is temporary.’
Speaking with our team, we discussed the endings that appealed to us most in a novel, and why they are (or aren’t) important to the arc of a narrative. We asked ourselves: does the ending of a book need to be memorable to be good? Does the way a book ends impact our views on the entire book? How does knowing the ending of a book before it has even begun change the reading experience? And do we read simply to get to the end of a story?
The endings popular in fiction have changed over the centuries; from Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, to post-modernist open endings, to whodunnits and cliffhangers, endings and our notion of what constitutes one continually evolve and are repurposed.
Between the team, we had different preferences when it came to the conclusions we like. Alastair prefers to put his own ending on a novel, rather than being presented a neatly tied-up conclusion. For example, he recalls the subtlety of Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, and the sense that its meaning lies in what is not said. Emma reflects on an ending that left her completely gobsmacked, that of Home Fires by Kamila Shamsie; she had to step away from the book and gather her thoughts before returning to it. Madeleine is partial to a dramatic ending, but concurs there always needs to be space to add our own interpretations to a conclusion. Danielle favours closure, and she mused on how essential happy endings are for children’s books, as well as ones which prompt important conversations. I personally love those shock endings - The Wasp Factory, for example, although I wonder how well that ending holds up today (adding a whole new dimension to the conundrum).
Danielle Evans on Endings and The Subterranean
In case you missed it, Danielle Evans gave us a seismic answer on our question about the endings of short stories - the sort of answer only an accomplished writer could give, providing the technical details behind emotional resolutions versus plot conclusions.
I also wondered if I could ask about endings. Our theme for this issue is resolution and one of the ways we're going to look at it is via endings and literary endings and how authors end their books, but also how readers feel about endings of books because there can be quite a lot of disagreement over the merit of an ending. And I feel like that does link into short stories – I'm always a lot more satisfied by the ending in a short story because the story itself feels like a brief moment in time instead of a longer journey that culminates in a big ending; sometimes it can feel like you're reading a novel just to find out what happens at the end, whereas it never feels that way in a short story. Is that something that you agree with and how do you approach the end of the story?
Yeah, I think cautiously, because if you get to the end of a short story and it's not working, you've done the whole thing wrong and you have to start over earlier, so I’m always holding my breath a little when I get to the ending. I think two things: one, I think of endings sometimes in terms of operating questions. I think you want the reader to have a satisfying experience; there's a question, and it doesn't have to be a plot question, but there's a question you promised the reader you’d resolve by the end of the story to make it a worthwhile use of their time, right? And then there's some question or questions you want to leave open to sit with the reader, and so I think of the balance of the ending in terms of, ‘What are the open questions? And what are the closed questions?’ Did I keep my promise in terms of a satisfying answer to something I was teasing the reader with, but then also, did I open up a question that they weren't expecting, or did I give them something in return? So that's one way I think about endings.
The other way I think about endings is that the ending - the ending ending, the very last paragraph - is usually a little bit too late for the story’s subterranean to emerge entirely. It’s like a volta; you want the turn in the story to usually come a page or two before the ending, so sometimes that's where the ‘Oh, that's what I was supposed to be looking at this whole time’ thing emerges. And that is sometimes trickier to calibrate than the actual ending because you don't want it to be a flashing neon sign that takes all the wonder and mystery out of the story, but you also want it to be clear what you want people to look at.
I think often you'll see a short story have a place where it could have ended and it will go a paragraph further, and sometimes that is just editing, but a lot of times like it feels really intentional to me that stories feel like they have two endings; something ends the active plot, and something ends the more emotional plot. And so, I've gotten used to looking at where could this story have stopped? And then why did it keep going? I don't mind a story that keeps going, but I'm often interested in, ‘Why that extra beat?’. I think often that extra beat is going back to the open-up question and not the closing plot question.
Room for Thought
In clear-cut endings, we are left with no ambiguity; no room for differing interpretations or meandering thoughts. The best kind of endings, at least for me, are those ones that throw you off completely - making you reconsider everything you thought you knew up to that point in the story. They leave room for more reflection and rumination than before, and are the mark of a great writer.
In an essay in the Guardian, ‘In praise of novels without neat conclusions’, Lee Rourke writes, ‘Why are we so fearful of ambiguity? Why do we desire novels that, to paraphrase Alain Robbe-Grillet, do the "reading" for us?’. Perhaps we are afraid of those novels that challenge our patterns of thinking and beliefs, that leave us with uncertainty of what is and isn’t, that create more nuance than they began with. In today’s climate, people often feel like they have to have unfaltering opinions and set beliefs, to be for or against something. As a society, we often don’t allow for the evolution of thinking and nuance, and narratives that abolish black-and-white thinking go firmly against such sentiments.
Rouke continues, ‘Life isn't like the narratives that make up the majority of novels in circulation today, or like the well-rehearsed scenes we enjoy at the theatre, or in the movies. It's more complicated than that: steeped in confusion, dead ends, blank spaces and broken fragments.’ As humans, we want answers and we seek out certainty; we remove room for anxiety, and map out our futures. We seek perfection and resolution rather than being present in the messiness and uncertainty of it all. Is it not plausible that that is reflected in our attitude towards endings?
I want to end this with a quote from Joan Acocella on endings from The New Yorker, ‘Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end. The stone fell in the water. The ripples ran. Now they should stop. The surface should be smooth again.’
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