Plotting the ending

[kalypso_v]

I've been been mulling for a while something about endings, and I'm not sure that it's really reached a coherent form yet, but I'd like to get it out of the way. As most of you know, I like tragic endings, with bodies all over the stage. And I also like happy endings that take me by surprise, where disaster seems certain until a happy catastrophe

Comments

[hafren]

What this puts me in mind of most is my reactions to the ending of His Dark Materials. At the first reading, I just abandoned myself happily to the angstfest, which was wonderful. But.. I did, even then, have an uneasy feeling that the ending didn't really grow from the story; I think it was conceived quite a long time before we got there and it doesn't really feel as inevitable as I'd like it to. One has this uneasy feeling they could find another wormhole between universes somehow. And I think this is why, though I've re-read that ending, I don't feel I need to re-read the whole book to get the impact from it. I can get the angst-rush just from the ending, and ideally that shouldn't be so, because the mood in which you read the end should be created by all that's gone before.

An ending that really doesn't work for me is the happyish one that Dickens unwillingly grafted on to Great Expectations because his publisher found the first one too downbeat (it is, and it's also perfect for the book). The "new" one invites you to suppose Pip and Estella may get together, and there's no good reason in the world that should happen. When I found an edition with the original ending, everything kind of slid into place; it just felt right.

[sallymn]

Absolutely agree about Great Expectations. Also the film The Third Man, where at the end Anna walks from the cemetery, straight past the waiting Holly Johnson (the hero/protagonist). Apparently David Selznick and the American production company - and even writer Graham Greene - wanted a happy 'conventional' ending where they'd be reconciled and go off together, but Carol Reed, the director, insisted on the bleakness of our knowing they would never meet again.