Completion and Farewell

Page 6 American Book Review Completion and Farewell James Phelan Looking at, say, the top five or even ten last lines of ABR’s 100 Best Last Lines from Novels, we have an easier time seeing how different they are than seeing what they might have in common. The unnamable narrator’s concluding contradiction , the Invisible Man’s challenge to his audience, Nick Carraway’s sententious summary of what he has learned from observing the life of Jay Gatsby, Molly Bloom’s vivid recollection of saying “yes” to Leopold—so vivid that it spans the gap between past and present—Huck Finn’s re-assertion of his independence from “sivilization”: these are all wonderful lines, but isn’t the effort to rank them an exercise in comparing apples and aardvarks? Do great final lines have anything in common that we can appeal to as we try to judge some as better than others? Before I offer a few answers, I want to stress that my goal is not to identify the Indisputable Objective Criteria for such judgments. I get it that the Best 100 Last Lines are the result of numerous individual aesthetic assessments that are themselves grounded in a whole range of beliefs about quality, some inherited and others hard-won from years of experience reading (and in some cases writing) fiction . I also get that the point—and the fun—of the rankings is their capacity for generating debate (how did 1984, ranked seventh, crack the top ten, when Middlemarch, ranked twenty-ninth, barely makes the top thirty? Is the ending of The SunAlso Rises, ranked sixth, so much better than the ending of A Farewell to Arms, number sixty-four on the list?). Rather than trying to spoil the fun, I hope to add some spice to the debates by proposing to identify the underlying elements of the lines the judges are responding to as they make their holistic individual rankings. The rankings depend on judgments about the lines both as stand-alone entities and as integral parts of the novels in which they appear. As stand-alone entities, the last lines have three salient features that influence their ranking: substance, pithiness, and portability .As integral parts of their novels, the lines also have three salient features affecting their ranking: the carryover effect from judgments about the rest of the novel, and their contributions to two important functions of narrative endings: completing a line of action or of narration (what I’ll call completion) and initiating our transition from the fictional world back to our own world (what I’ll call farewell). Isn’t the effort to rank the best last lines from novels an exercise in comparing apples and aardvarks? Together, substance, pithiness, and portability produce “quotability,” the capacity for the lines to migrate from their moorings in the novel and be used in other contexts. Samuel Beckett gives us eleven monosyllabic words in three short clauses encapsulating the existential struggle between rational despair and irrational hope that can be applied to many other situations. Jake Barnes’s concluding question to Lady Brett Ashley gets its substance from Jake’s gentle but firm tone of let’s-finally-cut-the-crap-whydon ’t-we, and it is as pithy as and even more portable than Beckett’s three clauses. Indeed, that portability partially explains why the line ranks so much higher than the concluding sentence of A Farewell to Arms—or at least it’s pretty to think so. F. Scott Fitzgerald goes for substance more than pithiness or portability, but the alliteration and the well-turned metaphor gives his line, ranked third on ABR’s list, some pith, and the generalizing move gives it some portability. James Joyce gets substance from his mastery of Molly’s lyrical, eroticallycharged outpouring of emotion, and, her last words, “yes I said yes I will Yes,” are exemplars of pithiness and portability. Mark Twain gives substance to Huck’s decision by emphasizing Huck’s independence from “sivilization” and, like Joyce, gives us pith and portability in the final words (fifth on the list), which also provide an apt closure to this consideration of quotability: “I been there before.” As...