{"id":6341,"date":"2017-01-18T08:26:18","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T13:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6341"},"modified":"2017-01-18T08:26:18","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T13:26:18","slug":"is-it-over-story-endings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6341","title":{"rendered":"Is It Over? Story Endings"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"No

Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men<\/p><\/div>\n

Writer Toby Wallis has written a thoughtful essay in Glimmer Train<\/a> on story endings. He centers a lot of his argument on Cormac McCarthy\u2019s chilling novel, No Country for Old Men<\/em>, in which, as he says \u201cthe climax that the story appears to be building towards just doesn\u2019t happen.\u201d It (like the terrific movie made from it) may make audiences feel left hanging, and incomplete, at least until further reflection. One thing to consider is, whose story is it? The killer’s or the sheriff’s? Whether the ending satisfies depends in part on the answer to that question.<\/p>\n

As Wallis says, \u201cAt first I was disappointed . . . like the rug had been whipped out from under me. Two hours later, I loved it.\u201d Perhaps we\u2019ve been led by fiction\u2014and movies and especially television\u2014to believe all loose ends must be, can be tidied up, there is an answer to all questions, the broken can be made whole or at least set on the path to mending. But that\u2019s not how it is in real life, is it? We must all deal with ambiguity, incompletion, unravelings not to be reknitted. As troubling as an ending as McCarthy\u2019s is, worse, may be the ending where you feel the author thought, \u201cHoly crap! I\u2019ve got to wind this up.\u201d And does.<\/p>\n

McCarthy\u2019s approach leaves us pondering what happens next? Our curiosity about the story and its protagonists is not satisfied, it continues to tickle our imaginations, to stay with us at some level. Celeste Ng\u2019s Everything I Never Told You<\/em> also ends ambiguously. She says readers are very firm in their conviction about what happened by the end, based on the evidence they gleaned in the novel. Yet their interpretations vary widely<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Genre fiction\u2014and here I\u2019ll speak of the genres I know best, crime novels and thrillers\u2014approach endings differently. Thrillers generally adhere to the convention of restoring order to the world, so a tidy post-carnage ending is expected. Many crime novels are not so black and white. They leave room for doubt. Often they are critical of the status quo (corruption in city hall, incompetent police leadership, media on the take, etc.), so why return to it? A police detective may be able to solve a murder, but darker societal forces may be behind it. \u201cThat\u2019s Chinatown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Outside of genre, in literary novels, Wallis says \u201cstories are at their very best when they ask questions . . . at their didactic worst when they presume to answer them.\u201d At least, when they presume to answer every last one of them. When I look back over the literary fiction of last year that I enjoyed most\u2014Paul Beatty\u2019s The Sellout<\/a><\/em>, Lily King\u2019s Euphoria<\/a><\/em>, Angela Flournoy\u2019s The Turner House<\/a><\/em>, for example\u2014every one of them leaves space for readers to speculate, to use their own imaginations, to engage with the author in the creative process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writer Toby Wallis has written a thoughtful essay in Glimmer Train on story endings. He centers a lot of his argument on Cormac McCarthy\u2019s chilling novel, No Country for Old Men, in which, as he says \u201cthe climax that the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Is It Over? Story Endings - the uses of ambiguity","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,5,29],"tags":[797,799,117,798],"class_list":["post-6341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-imagination","category-writing","tag-celeste-ng","tag-cormac-mccarthy","tag-endings","tag-toby-wallis"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Eh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6341"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6343,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6341\/revisions\/6343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}