Lecture 14: Happily Ever After (Except For Series) How To End A Plot

As noted earlier in the course, literature is the creation of order out of chaos— the creation of meaning and structure out of reality, which is otherwise meaningless and without structure. We've already seen several ways in which fiction imposes order on chaos: When we evoke a person, a scene, or a situation, we select the details that best get across what we want the reader to see and understand. When we write dialogue, we suggest real speech without actually reproducing it, thus imposing purpose on speech. But perhaps the most obvious way that fiction imposes order on chaos is through the creation of stories and plots, which will be the subject of this and the next five lectures.

Believability And Satisfaction
In part, believability depends on what we as readers bring to a story, specifically our own individual understanding of how the real world works and what real people are like.

This doesn't mean that the rules of the real world can't be bent: Your readers are willing to accept that the laws of nature can be altered, broken, or ignored in fantasy, horror, and science fiction, as long as you provide an alternative set of rules for your fictional world and stick to them.

Readers of any genre, however, are less likely to buy into a character whose final actions violate their beliefs about human psychology. Different readers have different ideas and expectations about how human beings think and behave or how they ought to think or behave. An ending that strikes one reader as completely plausible and even admirable may strike another as preposterous and even offensive.

Consider the ending of Jane Eyre. The brooding, sexually magnetic Mr. Rochester persuades Jane to fall in love with him without bothering to tell her that he's already married and that he keeps his first wife locked in the attic. At the end of the novel, after a series of plot twists, Jane happily marries Mr. Rochester.

Most readers accept this ending, given the narrative conventions of the time and because Jane is such an admirable character that we want her to be happy. Still, it's possible to imagine a reader who just can't believe that someone as smart and independent as Jane would give someone as manipulative and self-serving as Mr. Rochester a second chance.

If you believe that character is more fundamental to fiction than plot, then the key to crafting a believable ending is staying true to the nature of your characters. You can make an ending believable if you can get the reader to play along with the premise and if you play fair with the reader by obeying the rules of your own world but especially by respecting your own characters.

Just because an ending is believable doesn't mean it's satisfying. In the terminology of philosophy, believability is a necessary condition of a satisfying ending, but it is not a sufficient one.

As we've seen, believability isn't an absolute quality, but satisfaction is even more dependent on taste and personal experience.

We can conceivably make a case for the believability of an ending, but we can no more convince a skeptic to be satisfied by an ending than we can make people change their minds about foods they don't like.

Resolution
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner says that there are two ways a narrative can end: "in resolution, when no further event can take place .. or in logical exhaustion." Of course, there are other types of endings, but these two definitions probably cover most possibilities. Let's start with resolution, which is what we've termed a binary ending one that resolves an either/or situation or answers a simple question posed at the beginning of the narrative.

Plots with binary endings are often dismissed as mechanical and contrived, and many of them are. We could even argue that the ending of some simple binary narratives is the least important thing about them; the real reason we enjoy them is that we enjoy the setting or characters. This is often the case with well-written genre narratives: The journey is interesting, even if the destination turns out to be unmemorable.

But it's also true that many binary endings are both immensely satisfying and unforgettable, perhaps even the high point of the story.

John le Carré's novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is the story of a veteran British spy named George Smiley who is asked by the British intelligence service to find a Soviet mole in its midst.

Le Carré complicates the ending of the novel by making the mole an upper-class Englishman and a former lover of Smiley's wife. It's a binary ending with layers, because the mole's betrayal is at once political, social, and personal.

Binary endings are the kind we find in most bestselling novels and popular movies and television shows: Who committed the crime? Will the star-crossed lovers get together?

Many literary novels also have binary endings. Perhaps the most satisfying binary ending of a literary story can be found in Henry James's The Aspern Papers. Here, James not only imagines a binary situation that generates suspense, but he peoples the plot with three vivid and sharply defined characters and stays true to them throughout.

Logical Exhaustion

Gardner's "logical exhaustion" is the point at which a narrative has reached its deepest understanding of a character or a situation, beyond which it would just be repeating itself. This sort of ending does not rely on raising a binary expectation in the reader, but it does require the early pages to draw the reader into the narrative, setting up an expectation that some sort of revelation will occur.

One variety of this kind of ending is the epiphany, exemplified in Katherine Mansfield's short story "Miss Brill." Like many epiphany stories, this one doesn't have a plot, but like the best of them, it is carefully constructed to deliver a devastating emotional blow at the end.

Every sharply observed detail and every slight shift of emotion in this story builds toward a single piercing epiphany. Mansfield starts by introducing a late-middle-aged woman who lives alone and whose most elegant possession is an old fox stole, which reminds her of her youth.

In the middle section, Mansfield shows us the park Miss Brill visits every Sunday and allows us to participate in what she sees there. We see how she prides herself on her gift of quiet observation, and we share the slight superiority she feels toward the people she observes so sharply.

We share Miss Brill's moment of communion with the people in the park: She's one of the players in a kind of play they all put on each Sunday. She even takes a brief respite from her loneliness by indulging in the fantasy of them all singing together. But then, her illusions are shattered by two thoughtless lovers who sit on the end of her park bench, and in the end, she sees herself as the world sees her—old, unfashionable, and alone.

There's no binary plot here, no situation to resolve, but the story moves with ruthless efficiency to an ending that's every bit as precision engineered— and every bit as powerful-as the ending of The Aspern Papers.

Hybrid Ending
The hybrid ending exists halfway between the binary ending and the epiphany. We see an example in Flannery O'Connor's story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," about a southern family that takes a drive to Florida and ends up murdered on a lonely country road by a serial killer.

The killer, who is called The Misfit, is mentioned in the first paragraph of the story, when the grandmother of the family reads aloud from the newspaper about his recent escape from prison. Then, The Misfit is mentioned only once more, briefly, in the middle of the narrative, before he and his henchmen turn up later.

The reappearance of The Misfit might have been a Dickensian coincidence in the hands of a lesser writer, but his appearance in the newspaper in the first paragraph is played for laughs so that when he reappears at the end full of genuine menace, the reader's experience mirrors that of the family members as they slowly realize that they're about to die.

The ending of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" falls halfway between a binary ending and an epiphany. On the one hand, it ends definitively, with the murder of several of its characters, but like an epiphany story, it changes everything the reader thought about what came before. It doesn't answer a question that was openly posed at the beginning of the story but instead answers a question that the reader didn't even realize was being posed until the story is finished: Is the world a safe place?

Thoughts on Endings

The endings of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," The Aspern Papers, and
"Miss Brill" are all satisfying in part because they are all prepared for early in the narrative. All three of these endings also essentially leave the reader with nothing left to know. The major questions are answered, and we have gained our deepest understanding of the situation or the characters.

The fact that all three of these endings are more or less airtight and perfectly prepared for doesn't necessarily mean that James, Mansfield, and O'Connor knew the ending of each story before he or she started.

It might seem that knowing the ending in advance is the easiest way to write, because you can craft the story to head in that direction. But you may also find yourself forcing the characters in a particular direction whether they want to go there or not, with the result that your plot can seem contrived and your characters can seem more like puppets than real people.

Not knowing where you're going may sometimes be easier than planning ahead and may even lead to a more satisfying ending. You may find that your ending arises effortlessly and organically from the situation and the characters-an inevitable result of your choices along the way. Of course, with this method, you may also find that you have painted yourself into a corner or drafted a narrative that just peters out.

We've noted repeatedly that literature is the creation of meaning out of an otherwise meaningless existence. The ending of a narrative is where that meaning is most sharply defined. It's where the hidden patterns are finally revealed, and we at last have a moment, however fleeting, where we understand everything that came before. In other words, the secret of a satisfying ending is not that it's definitive or revelatory, happy or unhappy, but that there's nothing left to say.
—James Hynes

Writing Exercise Prompt
Choose a story or a novel that you love, imagine a different ending for it, and then work backward to see what you'd have to change to make the new ending believable and satisfying. Consider Jane Eyre as an example. Jot down a rough outline of everything in the book that leads to Jane's marriage to Mr. Rochester, then imagine a different ending:
She marries someone else in the novel, or she decides to live by herself on her inheritance money. Go back through your outline to see what you'd have to change in the story to make the new ending work.

Enjoy!