Earned: deposit and pressure
“Earned” is the central word in talk about endings and the least examined. It contains two claims, which fail differently and need opposite remedies. The first is about preparation and is a fact about the text: every element the ending uses as load-bearing must exist in the book before the ending. Anyone with a copy can check it, and its instrument is the plant audit, which lists what the ending rests on and traces each item to its first appearance. Its failure is the unearned rescue, and its remedy is usually a sentence planted early. The second claim is about pressure and is a fact about the reader: the ending must feel, in hindsight, like what the book was moving towards. It cannot be checked, it can fail in a book where every element is dutifully planted, and its remedy is not more planting but a want, running through the middle of the book, that the ending answers.
The two failures look alike from inside a draft. When a plant is missing the reader asks where did that come from?; when pressure is missing the reader asks so what? Adding pressure to an unplanted ending produces melodrama, and adding plants to an unfelt one produces a well-documented shrug. The full statement the chapter uses is that an ending is earned when everything it relies on was already in the book and what it does with that material answers a pressure the book has built. The first is a matter of deposit, the second of interest accrued on it, and the second is also the answer to Miller’s objection in How It Works: an ending that closes the narratable by answering a pressure the narratable generated has given the reader something in exchange.
Inevitable is not predictable
The commonest misunderstanding is that an earned ending is one the reader can see coming. Predictability is a property of the reader before the ending, who can say what will happen; inevitability is a property of the reader afterwards, who cannot imagine it otherwise. All four combinations occur. Predicted and inevitable is the pleasure of tragedy and of the marriage plot, where nobody doubts that Elizabeth will marry Darcy and the interest lies in the route. Predicted and not inevitable is tedium. Unforeseen and arbitrary is the cheat. Unforeseen and, in retrospect, the only possible outcome is the target, and it has a teachable structure: plant the materials in plain sight and withhold the combination. Afterwards the reader can point to every component; beforehand they could not assemble them, because the assembling needed a decision, a recognition or a change of vantage that only the ending supplies. Gérard Genette’s word for the unemphatic advance notice is the amorce, a seed that passes as ordinary, and the test of a plant is not whether the reader noticed it but whether they can find it afterwards.
Two corollaries follow. Coincidence may start a story and may not end one, because an opening coincidence generates the causal chain and a closing one replaces it. And the rule nothing new and load-bearing at the end forbids new load, not new material: an ending may contain a room the reader has not seen or a stranger on a bus, provided it does not rest on them. The test is substitution: remove the element, and if the ending still works it is furniture.
Multiplicity at the close
Multiplicity, one unit of text doing several jobs at once, is the principle of The Purposes of a Scene (Chapter 1) and of every chapter since. At the opening it is a matter of space. At the ending it is a matter of simultaneity: an ending that works through the domains in turn is legible as a procedure, and the reader who can watch the machinery suspects that the book was machinery too. The last sentence of Things Fall Apart (1958) shows the alternative. Okonkwo has hanged himself, and the District Commissioner, who has been thinking that the story might make a reasonable paragraph in his book, has already chosen the title: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger. Plot, character, theme, catharsis and form are all touched, and the sentence performs no visible closing work. Achebe has not packed five things into it; he has found the one vantage from which one thing means five.
Closural multiplicity lives in humble places more than in symbols. The object already in the room, established and left lying about, carries plot, character, theme and image without a word of explanation, because all four meanings were deposited earlier. A gesture the book has shown before, performed differently, carries the change and the parallel. Tense, person and the choice of who holds the last position cost nothing and alter a whole paragraph’s relation to the reader: Flaubert gives the end of Madame Bovary to the pharmacist Homais, Achebe to the Commissioner, and the assignment is the argument.
Multiplicity has a ceiling. In the over-determined ending every noun means something, the weather participates and the last line answers the first, and the reader hears the book locking shut. Roland Barthes argued that details which signify nothing but reality authenticate a fictional world; an ending with no inert material withdraws that authentication when the reader is deciding whether the book was true. An ending needs something that means nothing, a bus going past or a stool somebody sits on. Middlemarch is the limit case: its Finale settles every major figure and generalises at length, and does not read as arranged, because its narrator has been doing this for eight hundred pages.
Climax and aftermath: the proportion problem
The largest structural decision at an ending is how much aftermath to write, and the two errors are opposite, so a writer correcting one tends to produce the other. The aftermath can do things the climax cannot: show consequences, complete a second arc, let the reader register the value shift at lower pressure, release catharsis, return a transported reader and leave a last image. It must not introduce a new question, resolve threads in order of appearance rather than weight, explain what the climax meant, or continue past its own last decision. That gives the chapter’s working rule, the last-decision rule: find the final decision any character takes, however small, and end within a page of it, since consequences are endless and decisions can be counted.
The rule has two kinds of exception. Anna Karenina (1878) runs a whole eighth part after Anna’s death, about Levin’s search for faith; readers have complained since publication, and the part is indispensable, because a novel with two arcs cannot complete both at one climax. An aftermath is not too long while it completes an arc, and is too long once it only reports consequences. At the other extreme The Grapes of Wrath has no aftermath at all and is complete, because its last gesture is itself a decision.
See also: the Reference account of earned and unearned, with sixteen closural strategies, substitution testing and a table of aftermath lengths by tradition; the Reference account of multiplicity, with the closural audit.