Let's End Things, Part 6

Endings that deal with time...

This is FINALLY the last post in the series... And it’s my favorite part.

For both readers and writers, I’ve been sharing my ginormous handout on endings, piece by piece. Here are Part 1, and Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 (although you don’t have to read them in order).

Today we’re talking about… How endings might deal with time.

All endings deal with time in some way—and time tends to be on our minds as we finish a story or book, reflect back on the bulk of it, think forward to a future in which we will not be reading this book. In this way, the end of a narrative is always about time in the same way that death is always about time—what was here, what is or isn’t here now, what will or won’t be here tomorrow.

And of course if we’re dealing with time, we’re either dealing with the past, the present, or the future. Only it can be much messier than that.

We might stay in the timeframe we’ve been in, or we might shift focus; we were in the present*, but now we’re looking to the future, or now we’re remembering the past – and that change itself is a signal that the narrative is ending. The shift helps the story feel complete.

*when I say “present” here I don’t mean present tense, but “story present”—i.e., the same timeframe as the rest of the story.

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Endings that keep us in STORY PRESENT include…

Continuing Action:

We end at the same speed we’ve been going; the world of the story hasn’t slowed or stopped. Perhaps we’re ending in stasis and the conflict is ongoing; perhaps things have been resolved and someone is resuming normal life. But as we stop, there’s still something to look at, something to watch. We are anchored to the present moment by action or scene.

From Jennifer Egan’s The Keep (her best book, incidentally; I will fight anyone on this):

…as I walk to the edge of the pool I’m filled with an old, childish excitement. I wait, letting the snow fall and melt on my hair and face and feet. I let the excitement build until it floods my chest.

I close my eyes and dive in.

And of course this can work with a past tense narration. From Danielle Evans’s “Virgins”":

“Right,” he said. He turned away from me and faced the wall. I looked at the back of his ears and reached for his shoulders to pull myself toward him.

The Reflective Ending (in the moment):

In Part 3, when we talked about how endings address meaning, I talked about the reflective ending… Here, I’m very specifically talking about a character or narrator reflecting in the moment, in story present—not from a distance.

Let’s back up from the iconic very last lines of The Great Gatsby to remember what Nick is doing in those last moments (bolding mine):

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

The Sensory Pinpoint:

We also talked about this one in Part 3, but here are some more examples. We don’t end on action, necessarily, but on an element of the present moment—an object or sound or taste or smell…

From Sula, by Toni Morisson:

It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.

From The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding:

He turned away to give them time to pull themselves together; and waited, allowing his eyes to rest on the trim cruiser in the distance.

The Freeze Frame:

This is a cool one. The narrative freezes in time, with a result similar to a still photograph. It’s not just that we’re hanging out in the moment looking at something (that would be the Sensory Pinpoint), but that narrative time has stopped.

From Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm:

Or that’s how I remember it, anyway. Me. Paul. The gab. That’s what I remember. And this story really ends right at that spot. I have to leave Benjamin there with that news, with a wish for reconciliation that he will bury in himself; I have to leave Elena, my mom, whom I have never really understood; I have to leave Wendy, uncertain, with one arm around the dog, and I have to leave myself – Paul – on the cusp of my adulthood, at the end of that annus mirabilis where comic books were indistinguishable from the truth, at the beginning of my confessions. I have to leave him and his family there because after all this time, after twenty years, it’s time I left.

Finis.

Other examples: Charlotte Bronte’s Villette; midway through the movie version of The World According to Garp, we understand that Garp’s son has died in an accident when the camera freezes on his face.

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Endings that look back to the PAST include…

Analepsis (a fancy word for flashback):

More specifically, analepsis is when the narrative jumps back in time—not just when a character remembers something from earlier (although, if that character is the narrator, and we really fully go back to the past, then that counts).

We might be flashing back to a decisive moment in a character’s life (often one we know of but haven’t witnessed), or it might be something we’ve already seen but are revisiting; or it might be news (shocking news, even) to us.

Dan Chaon’s You Remind Me of Me is about two adult brothers, one of whom was given up for adoption as a baby; we also flash back, occasionally, to the mother’s first pregnancy (with the son she gave up). But at the end, after all the present day drama has played out, we suddenly get the scene of her delivering her second son, the one she kept. This is a moment we’ve always known about (she must have delivered her son) but we’ve never seen it:

She just wants a second chance, she thinks. She just wants to be able to think a moment before she takes another step into her life, to pause and trace along the edges of the people that she might become, but already they are putting a plastic mask over her face, already they are talking to her about breathing and bearing down, and she doesn’t know what she wants yet. She doesn’t know.

Or—and this is a devastating one—we could flash back to the moment of hope before a disaster that we all know is coming. This can be a way to end a very sad story on a note of hope, albeit perhaps a false and bittersweet hope.

From Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being; we have already seen Tomas and Tereza die in an accident, but in the last few chapters we go back to a happy time in their life, and we end on a night when they were dancing:

Then they all went upstairs and to their two separate rooms.

Tomas turned the key and switched on the ceiling light. Tereza saw two beds pushed together, one of them flanked by a bedside table and lamp. Up out of the lampshade, startled by the overhead light, flew a large nocturnal butterfly that began circling the room. The strains of the piano and violin rose up weakly from below.

The Summation:

The narrator takes us back over the broader points of the story, or summarizes a character’s life. Of course this must be done with restraint, or it can come off as sentimental.

From George Elliott’s Middlemarch:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

I already used it in talking about sound, but here, again, is the ending of Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love:

Really, there isn’t much to say.

He was a great writer.

He fell in love.

It was his life.

The Elegy:

This is a lament for a world or an era (or a person) that is no more—and often, by extension, for the world of novel, the world we’ve been living in for 200 pages (although in the example below, McCarthy is elegizing a world that was gone before his novel even started). I absolutely refuse to read The Road, by the way, but that’s a story for another day.

From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

A brief interruption, courtesy of my husband: “The genius of the ending of The Road is that it could also be the ending of any other book. You just append it. You could put it on Catcher in the Rye! It would still work!”

Other examples: Ten Thousand Saints, by Eleanor Henderson (the closing of CBGB treated elegiacally—lest you think this has to be about something quiet)

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Endings that point to the FUTURE include…

The Open Ending

We talked about these in Part 1. The future might be a cipher, but our attention has been sent in that direction.

I will repeat the ending of Dr. Seuss’s absolutely terrifying The Butter Battle Book, a book for children about nuclear war:

“Grandpa!”  I shouted.  “Be careful! Oh, gee! Who’s going to drop it?  Will you…? Or will he…?

“Be patient,” said Grandpa. “We’ll see. We will see…”

Prolepsis (a fancy word for flashing forward):

Here, we jump forward and live in the next period for quite a bit—an epilogue or a whole chapter or just long enough to see something new happen.

From Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys:

I do my writing in the morning, now, if the boy will let me, and in the afternoon when I’m not teaching, and sometimes in the evening when I get home from the Alibi Tavern… [He goes on to talk about himself in the third person, saying he holds court there at the tavern.] The young men listen dutifully, for the most part, and from time to time some of them even take the trouble to go over to the college library, and dig up one or another of his novels, and crouch there, among the stacks, flipping impatiently through the pages, looking for the parts that sound true.

Other examples: The Breakup (movie); Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins

Caveat: A glimpse is often enough. If you give too much information on too many people, it ends up looking like the end of Animal House.

The Predictive Ending:

We aren’t in the future yet, but the narrator or narrative voice is pretty sure where things are going and starts using the future tense.

From Jill McCorkle’s “Intervention”:

“Here’s to the last drink,” he says as she sits down beside him. He breathes a deep sigh that fills the room. He doesn’t ask again if she had anything to do with what happened. He never questions her a second time; he never has. And in the middle of the night when she reaches her hand over the cool sheets, she will find him there, and when spring comes and the sticky heat disgusts her with all the failures in her life, he will be there, and when it is time to get in the car and drive to Myrtle Beach or to see the kids, perhaps even drive all the way to Minnesota to see their grandchildren, she will get in and close the door to the passenger side without a word. She will turn and look at the house that the two of them worked so hard to maintain, and she will note as she always does the perfect green grass of the front yard and how Sid fixed it so that there is not a trace of the mess she made. It is their house. It is their life. She will fasten her seatbelt and not say a word.

This can also be inverted so that the narrator is delusional—we know the predicted events are never going to happen; we could call it the Ironic Predictive ending.

From Raymond Carver’s “Fat”:

I feel depressed. But I won’t go into it with her. I’ve already told her too much.

She sits there waiting, her dainty fingers poking her hair.

Waiting for what? I’d like to know.

It is August.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

Another subcategory of the Predictive ending, particularly for 1^st person or limited 3^rd, is The Decision or Resolution. The character looks forward, resolving to change, start over, move on, etc.

From Twain’s Huckleberry Finn:

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

And of course this might well be doomed and ironic; we can have the Doomed Resolution.

From Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day:

I have of course already devoted much time to developing my bantering skills, but it is possible I have never previously approached the task with the commitment I might have done. Perhaps, then, when I return to Darlington Hall tomorrow—Mr. Farraday will not himself be back for a further week—I will begin practising with renewed effort. I should hope, then, that by the time of my employer’s return, I shall be in a position to pleasantly surprise him.

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And then some endings COMBINE TIME SETTINGS in fascinating ways…

The Crystal Ball:

(That’s not a technical term.) Here, we’re allowed a brief glimpse of what’s to come before we resume the action of the present moment. This can be illuminating or hopeful or, as below, devastating.

From Etgar Keret’s “Joseph,” a short story set in Israel. Two men are sitting in a cafe:

I look at the sweaty guy in the coat. It’s the first time in my life I see a suicide bomber. Afterward, in the hospital, foreign journalists will ask me to describe him and I’ll say I don’t remember. Because I’ll think it’s something kind of personal, something I should keep between me and him. Joseph will survive the blast too. But not so the waitress. Not that there’s any culpability on her part. In terrorist attacks, character is not a factor. In the end, it’s all a matter of angle and distance. “That guy who just came in is definitely running away from something,” Joseph says, and laughs, rummaging around in his pockets for some change for the tip. “Maybe he’ll agree to write the screenplay for me or at least meet for coffee.” Our waitress, laminated menu in hand, dances her way over to the sweaty guy in the coat.

Other examples: Junot Diaz, “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars”; Tobias Wolff, “Powder”

The Telescopic Ending:

This one is tricky but cool. We zoom out, to a point in the future from which we (possibly like the characters) have more wisdom and perspective on what just happened here – and we look back on this time, the “present” of the story. Sometimes this is accomplished with the subjunctive mood (e.g., “Years later, he would return to town after his marriage fell apart, and think back on the failure of the Italian restaurant…”) We might have known all along that the story was being told in retrospect, or the ending might suddenly reveal a point of telling well beyond the story-present.

From Alice Munro’s “Post and Beam” (after a long, in-the-moment story about a young wife coming to terms with her imperfect marriage; what’s important is that this comes out of absolutely nowhere):

It was a long time ago that this happened. In North Vancouver, when they lived in the Post and Beam house. When she was twenty-four years old, and new to bargaining.

At the end of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Alice has told her older sister about her adventures, and her sister is now sitting there thinking (hey, a point of view shift, like we discussed Part 5!)…

Lastly, she pictured to herself how this same little sister of hers would, in the after-time, be herself a grown woman; and how she would keep, through all her riper years, the simple and loving heart of her childhood: and how she would gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale, perhaps even with the dream of Wonderland of long ago: and how she would feel with all their simple sorrows, and find a pleasure in all their simple joys, remembering her own child-life, and the happy summer days.

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Below the paywall, I have some bonus content as a thank-you to paid subscribers.

First, how I thought about time in ending The Great Believers.

Then, one of one of my favorite endings, an ending that does at least NINE of the different things we’ve been talking about.

To everyone else, thanks for coming on this long, weird journey! To paid subscribers, thank you, and read on…