Endings- YH

David Lodges, “The Art of Fiction” was written to provide readers with an explanation to every aspect in a work of literature. One chapter in this book is about the importance of the ending of a story. Lodge mentions that endings seem to be the weakest point of all authors since they are the most anticipated part of a story. With all of that anticipation comes expectations of the reader. The author feels that they have two choices to make for endings; either a happy one or an unhappy one. The chapter also mentioned that the ending isn’t just compromised of the last paragraph in a story or book, but can be built up in paragraphs or in pages. The most interesting point of this chapter was that the ending of a story is done in a way to snap the reader out of the story and back into normality.

After reading the short stories of Kate Chopin, I found that the author wasn’t really consistent in the way that she was writing her endings. There were many stories that had either happy endings or unhappy ones. Although there were a couple of inconsistencies, there were still a bunch of similarities in the writing. The most common thing that was present in the endings were the major plot twists that took place. These plot twists contradict what Lodge says about the endings of stories being the thing that brings the reader back into normality. Everything about the short stories are abnormal especially the endings.

In Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour”, the ending is the most important part of the story. The story builds up the readers happiness for the main character and then the one sentence ending cuts all that joy with killing her off. This one sentence ending is far from normal if you were to read any other story, but it fits perfectly with this story since it’s about a woman who is happy that her husband is dead which should definitely fall into the abnormal category. The readers expectation for the ending is challenged when presented with this ending. I see this as a strong characteristic of a story and strategy that an author can use because it makes the reader question whether or not what they thought of the character or situation was right.

Another work by Kate Chopin, “Desiree’s Baby”, shows the reader how important an ending can be. The ending of this story specifically teaches the reader a lesson about jumping to conclusions before understanding the whole story. This ending was extremely unexpected, just like “The Story of an Hour”, where throughout the whole story the reader is convinced that the child is of another race because of the mom but in the ending the grandparents reveal to the readers that it was really the father who was from another race. Before reading this ending, the reader would believe that the ending would be something expected, like the father never seeing Desiree ever again, but this plot twist grabbed the reader’s attention and made us question what we originally read.

Kate Chopin challenges the readers expectations with her plot twists in the ends of her short stories. The way that endings are written can leave a very powerful impact on a reader and the lesson that they learn.

-Yasmeen Hashimi