Three close readings of published endings, a short screen reading and the household revision case. Each reading names the domains served, the carriers that serve them and, where there is one, the disagreement, without settling it.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860–61): two endings
No other case lets a reader watch the plant audit, the tonal-match test and the question of imposed endings work on the same material. Pip, who believed his fortune came from Miss Havisham and was meant to win him Estella, has learned that it came from the convict Magwitch, lost the money and lost Estella to Bentley Drummle. Dickens’s first ending is brief. Years later, walking in London with Joe and Biddy’s small son, Pip meets Estella in the street; Drummle has died, she has remarried a Shropshire doctor, they exchange a few words and part, and Pip is glad to see that suffering has given her a heart to understand his. Dickens showed the proofs to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who urged a happier close, and rewrote it. In the published version Pip returns after eleven years to the site of Satis House, finds Estella in the ruined garden in the evening mist, and they leave together: I saw no shadow of another parting from her. John Forster, Dickens’s biographer, printed the cancelled ending, and the argument has run ever since.
The case for the original is congruence. The novel dismantles every expectation Pip held, and an ending that grants him the one he should have lost, in the garden where he learned to want it, concedes what the book argued; the original leaves him work, modest means and the adult capacity to see Estella’s suffering without wanting anything from her. The case for the revision begins with the plant audit, which favours it decisively: the garden, the ruin and the mists are long established, while the original rests on a street, a doctor and a horse the book has never shown. The revision also completes a pattern, the morning mists of Pip’s first departure answered by the evening mists now, and it is less happy than its reputation. Satis House is demolished, Estella calls herself bent and broken, and the last sentence reports only that Pip sees no shadow, in a novel about a man who sees wrongly. The serial text read I saw the shadow of no parting from her; the 1862 edition moved the negation to the shadow and added another, conceding that there has already been one.
What cannot be settled is a prior question, what kind of book this is: a satire on expectation wants the original, a study of two damaged people learning to perceive can take the revision. The case yields three lessons. The plant audit and the tonal-match test can disagree, and no procedure resolves them. Grammar can make an ending closed in plot and open in knowledge. And the provenance of an ending is not evidence of its quality: that Bulwer-Lytton asked for the change says why the second ending exists, not whether it is better.
Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987): the phrase that contradicts itself
The last chapter withdraws from scene into a choral register. Beloved is gone, the neighbourhood forgets her, and a sentence recurs: It was not a story to pass on. At its last occurrence the tense changes to This is not a story to pass on, and the novel ends on one word, Beloved, standing alone. The phrase forbids the story (do not hand it on), requires it (it cannot be passed over) and asserts that it persists (it will not pass away), and it is printed inside four hundred pages of transmission. The ambiguity is specific, which is what separates it from evasion: the reader can say which three things the sentence does and why the book cannot choose among them, since its subject is an event that must not be spoken of and must not be forgotten. The tense change is a terminal modification that turns from the characters’ past to the reader’s present. The last word serves every domain at once and is the title, so the book ends by becoming its own name, answering an opening that put a number, 124, where a name should be. A sceptic can argue that the choral register arrives after the story to supply an effect the story did not produce; the reply is that the unattributed monologues before it have taught the register.
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (2005): closure without release
Kathy H. has told the reader on the first page that she will stop being a carer at the end of the year, and the reader has learned what that means: she will begin the donations that have already ended Ruth’s life and Tommy’s. The novel’s question was never whether this would happen. The ending finds her driving in Norfolk, the county the Hailsham children called the place where lost things go. She stops by a field where rubbish has caught along a barbed-wire fence, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags, and lets herself imagine that if she waited, Tommy might appear across the field. She does not let the fantasy run. She cries without sobbing or losing control, then turns back to the car to drive off to wherever it was she was supposed to be.
Every domain is served by restraint. Plot was resolved before the scene began. Character completes on its constant, Kathy’s composure, with the one licensed fantasy as the change. Catharsis arrives at the size the narration has always allowed, tears without a scene. The final image is the fence of lost things, a closural allusion the book planted in its middle. And the last decision is the novel’s subject, the one readers argue about: she gets back into the car. The ending refuses the escape the reader has wanted for the length of the book, and the refusal is congruent, because no character in the book has ever run.
A screen reading: Six Feet Under, “Everyone’s Waiting” (HBO, 2005)
The series’ last episode, written and directed by Alan Ball, ends with Claire, the youngest Fisher, leaving Los Angeles for New York. As she drives, to Sia’s “Breathe Me”, the episode moves forward through each principal character’s death, decades ahead: her mother Ruth’s in a hospital bed, Keith’s in a robbery, David’s in a park, Federico’s on a cruise ship, Brenda’s in mid-conversation with her brother, and finally Claire’s own, in 2085, at the age of 102. By the rules of this chapter it should fail twice: it is the most total proleptic close imaginable, settling every named fate, and it continues long past the last decision, Claire’s departure. It works because the series’ every episode opened on a death, so the montage completes its formal pattern rather than reporting consequences, and because the departure is the decision and the deaths are its frame: the life Claire drives into is shown whole, which is what the series was about.
The household revision case: the ending
The draft. The ending in The Problem, in which a solicitor’s letter and the mother’s account explain everything by midnight.
The diagnosis. The plant audit fails on four load-bearing elements deposited nowhere: the solicitors, the trust, the medical report and the February date. The earned test fails on new information and, worse, on a new agent, so the book’s causal system is bypassed at its last step. The domains are misdistributed: plot is over-served, character unserved (four people receive and nobody acts), theme is stated by the mother, and the mother, who has had no scene, receives the longest speech in the book. The last line is an abstraction ending on know. One error produces the rest: the draft makes the book’s question what happened? when it has been what do these three do with what they can reconstruct? The first is answerable by a document, the second only by the siblings in each other’s presence. The draft also spends a plant: the changed locks, an unexplained act of withholding since The Dialogue Exchange (Chapter 3), become a practical measure with a stated purpose.
The revision.
They read it together, in the end — Elena at the register, Nadia on the stool, Dov standing because he said he’d rather. Their father’s hand ran clean and careful for eleven years of entries, prices and repairs and the ordinary arithmetic of keeping a small shop alive, and then, three pages from the end, a different kind of entry altogether: dates, a doctor’s name misspelled twice and corrected once, and beneath it, in the same careful hand as always, a list of what needed doing if he ran out of time to do it himself. He had known. He had not told them. He had, instead, done what he always did, which was write it down properly, in case anyone ever needed to check.
Dov’s hand picked up where his father’s left off on March the ninth, looser at first and then not. He hadn’t known what else to do with a ledger that had stopped making sense the way ledgers were supposed to.
It was Nadia who went up to the coat, in the end. It was hanging on the hook where nobody had moved it. She didn’t ask permission. She took it down, and after a moment, so the sleeves wouldn’t drag, she put it on.
What the revision did. It answers the operative question by putting the three in one room, and leaves the stated one, why the locks were changed, unanswered. It resolves by combination rather than material: the ledger has been seen only in fragments and alone, Elena’s reading interrupted before the illness entries and Dov writing forward without reading back, and now it is read whole, by all three, in the shop. Six domains are served by three carriers. The ledger carries plot (the father knew and wrote it down; Dov kept it from the evening of 9 March), theme (in case anyone ever needed to check, now understood by everyone in the room) and form (the book’s spine, read through at last); the room carries catharsis (three people together and silent); and the coat carries character and the final image. The arc completes by a repeated situation with its terms altered: Nadia has stood before the coat since The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4), and in Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7) her hand went no further than its pocket; here she takes it down. The constant is in the same clause, so the sleeves wouldn’t drag, her managing precision since the opening pages. The passage ends within a sentence of the last decision anyone takes, explains nothing, and gives the father the last word through his own phrase. The first draft of this passage read Nadia was the one who found the coat; she had not found it, having known where it was for four months, and the verb is corrected.
Run as test 2 (Plant audit), the audit traces the load to its plantings: the good pen and the line to the prologue (The Prologue, Chapter 10) and Backstory and Flashback (Chapter 7); the ledger to The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4), maintained in The Chapter Break (Chapter 6), The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13) and The Subplot (Chapter 14); the looser hand to The Chapter Break (Chapter 6), with The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13) showing whose it is; the doctor’s name to The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13); Nadia’s refusal to touch the coat to The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4) and the opening. One thing appears first here, the list of what needed doing, and the revision keeps it there as new material rather than new load: remove it and the ending still says that he knew and wrote it down, on the strength of the dates and the doctor’s name. The audit across the whole book is in the Reference case, rerun there across all eighteen chapters with every element the later chapters deposit, and summarised in Appendix D.
What the revision has not solved. The mother is unresolved, which is a choice with a cost: the defence is that her silence is the book’s last narratable material, kept moving, and that the reader who now has an explanation of the father’s silence can extend the same charity to hers; the cost is that a reader may feel the largest question has been sidestepped. Two details of the prologue’s last ordinary day, the boy at the glass and the sign never turned to CLOSED, are never redeemed, and need a second appearance in the middle of the book or deletion. The passage may be over-determined, since every noun means something; a sentence that means nothing, placed between the ledger and the coat, is the available correction. Elena, who drove the book’s forward motion, completes by presence rather than act, defended by her decision in the truck in Scene and Sequel (Chapter 2) and still the weakest completion in the passage. And the ending is covert, with no coda or change of register to signal the last scene, so it risks test 7 (Termination); its signal is an object withheld for a book and finally taken, and the move upstairs to the flat, made in one clause, is the place a reader may stumble.
See also: the Reference analyses, with readings of Middlemarch, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Ulysses, Don Quixote and Blindness, and the household plant audit across the whole book.