Reading Novels

18. Endings

241 18 Endings Although novels are often long, they are finite texts, they come to an end. As we have seen in chapter 8, closure is fundamental to narrative. Novels contain narratives, and we therefore read them as directed toward various kinds of closure. In our reading we have, as Frank Kermode points out, “considerable investment in coherent patterns”—the desire for a predictable ending and for the “satisfying consonance” of things.1 We read patterns back into the novel when we have reached the end, though the conclusions of the final chapter do not constitute the novel, and may indeed contradict much of what we have gained in the progress of our reading. If there is some danger in looking at novels through the prism of their endings , it is still inevitable that we do so. Endings, like incipits, are obvious points of reference from which analysis often starts. From the writer’s point of view the ending of the classic novel is only too often a matter of compromise with the demands of readers, publishers , and circulating libraries. According to Anthony Trollope, he had no idea how his novels would end: “When I sit down to write a novel I do not at all know and I do not care very much how it is to end.”2 But it does not then follow that Trollope’s endings are surprising: he consents to what he thinks the reading public demands, even as he complains about it; his plots converge into predictable patterns, into the moral and conventional. Many novels end with the promise of marriage. “Who can be in doubt of what followed?” the last chapter of Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818) begins. “When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point.” Many novelists of the nineteenth century were plagued by the demands of readers for some version of providential narrative—by the need for the novel to show reading novels 242 the working out of divine providence in the individual life, for things to seem to conform with the workings of God in nature. At its crudest this simply led to moralistic optimism: “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily,” Miss Prism says of her attempt at novel-writing in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. “That is what Fiction means” (act 2). Nineteenth-century novel endings needed to suggest that love, money, and moral problems would all be resolved—what Henry James called the “distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions , appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.”3 But when everything and everyone is provided for in this way, a novel comes too close to myth for modern tastes: many readers of realist fiction would also like some falsification of their expectations, some suggestion of disappointments in an imperfect world. Realism, as George Levine points out, should lead “not to closure but to indeterminacy.”4 We know the ending is coming in a novel when we see, in Jane Austen’s words, “the tell-tale compression of the pages,” indication “that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity” (Northanger Abbey [1818], vol. 2, chap. 16). We might also, of course, be all hastening to damnation. Endings quite often use the great symbols of the apocalypse: everything in flames, “the sky tall with scarlet” (Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September [1929]); “all collapsed” (Herman Melville, Moby-Dick [1851]); leaving a promise of “the earth’s new architecture, the old brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away” (D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow [1915]). If not actually apocalyptic, the end may imply the loss of innocence, Adam and Eve going out from the garden of Eden into the world, couples who “join hands” and walk away (Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles [1891]), to the “great beginning” of “the home epic” (George Eliot, Middlemarch [1871–72]) when “the world’s all before us,” though the world is “a mighty sea,” where we float “in fathomless waters” (Henry James, Portrait of a Lady [1881]). In modern realism the end may simply be metonymic: an exit. Final exits in novels frequently take place over thresholds, with a character about to enter or leave the house, or close the door on a room: “But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end” (Henry James, Wings of the Dove [1902]). [3.145.152.98] Project MUSE (2024-04...