*(Note: the references in the essay are mostly

confected – i.e. not real – please do not use them

yourself, but rather as a guide to how the

referencing should look. Note too that the

referencing style used here is MLA, though any of

the HKBU recommend styles is fine … APA,

Harvard etc.)

All’s Well That Ends Well: Why Happy Endings Are Rare in Literature (and

Difficult).

By Jade Wong

Have a look at your bookshelf, or, if you’re not at home, think about your favourite books –

now consider how many of them have a happy ending. If, like me, you read a lot of what is

known as ‘Classic Literature’, or ‘The Classics’, the answer will likely be “very few”. Think of the

ending to A Farwell to Arms. Having fled through WW1 battlefields and avoided armed

checkpoints, Fred and his pregnant girlfriend (faux wife) arrive in Switzerland, but she has

multiple haemorrhages (bleeding) and dies. Fred asks the nurses to leave the room so he can

say goodbye to her …

But after I got them to leave and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn't any good.

It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and

walked back to the hotel in the rain.

Hemingway 333

Similarly, consider the final scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, when Prince Fortinbras enters the

palace to find everyone, including Hamlet, poisoned:

Take up the bodies: such a sight as this

Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

Shakespeare

1

Matthew Vigor writes says that the shape of stories is related to evolutionary biology, that

“storytelling and human culture rose up and grew side by side” (88). While, at the same time,

“the shape of our stories tell us a lot about the way we perceive the world, and how we would

like to perceive it (Nakata 72). Considering this, I believe the reason for us not telling stories

that have happy ending is that storytelling may originally have been used for didactic purposes

– that is, to teach people about how to survive (Holland). With this in mind, it seems likely

stories with tragic endings might make effective warnings for people – first of all with regard to

where is safe to walk, drink, hunt etc. and later to what constitutes good moral behaviour for

the individual in society.

Even so, our evolutionary foundations need not be a prison – and it can be necessary, even

good, to move away from them. Indeed, I have always loved happy endings. The great fantasy

writer J.R.R. Tolkien did too, and we see happy endings in his classic The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien gave the kind of happy ending he liked to put in his stories a special name:

‘Eucatastrophe’, which is a neologism, combining the Greek words for ‘good’ and ‘destruction’

(see Holland, slide 32). Said Tolkien, “… the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you

with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to

produce.” (Tolkien, slide 33).

Lately, especially seeing the world is going through such a dark time, I have been trying to

introduce happier endings into my stories. If previously, sad and tragic endings were useful, I

feel certain that now is the time for a little brightness. Of course, as authors we cannot lie

about the state of things, but even in times of darkness, in places where everything seems to

be going wrong, I still believe it’s possible to find chinks of light, and that, surely, is one of the

vocations of the writer: to find light in the darkness, and use our skills with language and

storytelling to do that.

Recently I revised a story I had written many years ago, about an old man who died alone, with

no family and friends around him, so no one knew who he was, even after he had died. In the

past, the story ended this way, with a young boy who lived down the road from the man’s

house, talking with his mother:

“But why didn’t anyone know him, mum?”

“Some people prefer to live alone, to stay away from the world.”

“I feel bad, like we should have known.”

“How could we know? What would we do? Just go knocking on doors of houses”

Maybe the boy thought. What he did not tell his mother is that he had no friends at

school. That he often ate his lunch alone, that he stayed in the library at play time, so no

one would see he was by himself.

“Now let’s not talk about this, Jimmy. Finish your dinner and I’ll tuck you in bed.”

But he could not finish his dinner. And he did not sleep that night. He listened to the

silence of the house for hours after his mother had gone to bed. He was thinking about

the house down the road where the old man was alone.

Wong 9

2

I felt the ending was good, but now, reading it again, it depressed me, and I wanted it to be

different. I thought of Tolkien, and the idea of adding some unexpected joy to the story. And

that’s when I decided to introduce a little girl, who lived right next door to the boy, but whom

he had never spoken too. I wrote the ending again, and this time, when the boy lies down in

the dark and silence, rather than stay awake thinking about loneliness and death all night, he

hears a tap on the window, and sits up and sees a light. He realises this is the girl next door,

and she wants to talk to him. He opens his window and they talk a little about the old man

down the street, but then they promise each other not to let each other get old and die alone

like that, and they reach out and touch each other’s hands. Then the boy goes back to bed, and

this time he sleeps, and there is a smile on his face as he falls to sleep.

It is not always easy to write happy endings – sometimes it can feel more dramatic, more

‘literary’ to write sad and tragic ones, but with a bit of effort, I felt I was able to create

something new and unexpected with this ending … a light in the dark, literally and

metaphorically.

References

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farwell to Arms. Vintage, 2012.

Holland, Patrick. “Ending Stories.” WRIT4007 HKBU, Lecture, 2020

Nakata, Yumi. The Shape of Stories. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. MIT [online play] http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html.

Accessed 1 November 2020.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (WRIT4007 HKBU, “Ending Stories”, Lecture), 2020.

Vigor, Matthew. The Evolution of Stories. QUT Academic Press, 2019.