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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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IT only makes sense, if you think about it, that writers might struggle as they face the question of how to end, because the challenge, in essence, is to find the words and the tone with which to say good-bye. Such an analogy does not seem sentimental to me, for at base that’s exactly what occurs at the conclusion of a work of fiction – the writer (or, more truly, the voice that’s telling the story) saying good-bye to the reader. And we all know how difficult the moment of departure can be. Leaving a party, leaving a job, leaving a lover, leaving family and friends to move from Memphis to Chicago, we feel to varying degrees a dual desire to give a memorable parting impression while also wishing to stay true to who we are. We don’t want our parting words to sound phony or awkward, to seem inappropriate to the nature of the relationship, but we do want them to have a keen impact. To ourselves, we can even admit that we hope they will linger.
And so it is with the endings of our stories.
* * *
Any ending that succeeds culminates and at the same time continues the story. The mix of these two factors naturally varies according to whether the writer’s principal desire is to bring everything together or to leave matters more elliptically open. But, fundamentally, both qualities, culmination and continuation, must be present.
When thinking of the manner in which a narrative behaves as it heads toward its ending, consider the stratified structure of a song sung in rounds. Opening with the quick clean phrases of establishing melody, the song – the story – builds and builds, becoming steadily more complex, its gathering intricacy due to the staggered reintroductions of those first, initially unaccompanied phrases. This textural deepening continues until the song/story reaches a point, the narrative line now at its densest, at which the recurring phrases join and overlap for a fully interconnected and harmonious few moments – and what better definition of a plot reaching its climax?
After which, the flat-out volume again begins to fall and the harmony starts to simplify. The layers of participation – or, in the analogy, the elements of plot – peel away, leaving those last and once more solitary notes to be sung.
The metaphor is by no means perfect but can nevertheless help us understand that the conclusion of a story, like the concluding words of the song sung in rounds, is made up of and relies on all that’s come before it. Endings get their meaning and derive their relevance from the orchestrated strata of complexities leading up to their finales. And in some fashion they repeat, in phrases of final echoing lucidity, the essential strands of melody that were offered at the start.
The question, then, facing the writer is how to write an ending which benefits from all the complicated momentum that’s been funneled into it; one that sounds its confidence and retains a narrower but still resounding power, even as it sings its final notes alone.
* * *
Staying with the premise that effective endings work both to culminate and continue the story, I want to look carefully at some examples and to make the idea plainer still by dividing them into two general classifications: those which strive to impart a sense of summation, and those which are in various ways deliberately partial.
As always, this process of broadly categorizing some element of fiction is a crude exercise at best, since the artful closing of a story or novel eludes firm definition. And particularly in the effort, you might say, to perform a biopsy of analysis by removing and isolating an ending from the body of its story, there’s a further handicap: The full implication, the meaning, of an ending is of course received. And the source of its energy is the very story it has been separated from. Nevertheless, we can study the following models to good benefit. Think of them as stilled specimens pinned to a page, allowing us to examine their designs and, from that, their strategies.
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