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The first thing I thought of when I read the title of this topic was a worst ending. That ending was from 1984. The guy fights and fights so hard for what he believes in and then he gives up! Just like that!
As for a good ending...I don't know that I've ever read a book where the ending really stuck out for me that wasn't a bad ending. As long as they don't leave me frustrated, angry, annoyed, or depressed, I call them good endings.
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My least favorite was Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence. It was totally hollow. All the main characters except one had their memories wiped of all they experienced. How lame is that?
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That's so scary. I mean, I knew about the author Susan Cooper before, but it never really hit me. One of our family friends is named Susan Cooper, and she is also an author. Freaky coincidence, huh?
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quote:The first thing I thought of when I read the title of this topic was a worst ending. That ending was from 1984. The guy fights and fights so hard for what he believes in and then he gives up! Just like that!
Did you read the book?
"Just like that?"
They beat / starve / tortue / brainwash him for months.
He didn't give up "just like that."
The ending of 1984 was one of the most tragic I've ever read.
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I've read 1984 three times, because it is worth reading. To Orwell's credit, he was a very smart man and an extremely good writer, and I haven't regretted my time spent with anything he wrote (except Animal Farm; cannot stand that book.) As good as I think 1984 is, I still find the ending to be stupid. I didn't find it as tragic as I did annoying, because by the time they put a bullet in Winston's head, I didn't care about him. All attachment I had to his character died after the sequence with the rats, and from there on, it was like watching a robot straighten up the kitchen. There was nothing to care about.
On the other hand, a tragedy that did work for me was The Crucible. It was well-told throughout, and in the end, when the last guy died...well, I was downright miserable, but I still thought the entire tale was worth my time because I'd been emotionally invested with all the characters there.
However, this is subjective, and just my personal take on it.
There really aren't a lot of stories whose endings grabbed my attention and wouldn't let go. One reason for this may be that whenever there's a big twist at the end, someone I know that's read the book or seen the movie tells me how it finished. It's what happened when I read Ender's Game and saw The Sixth Sense; my friend with a big mouth told me the ending. Kind of irritating, but the stories were so incredibly good that it didn't matter, so I forgave him.
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The most frustrating ending I've ever read was the end of SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW. It was a great book right up to the last few pages. The big deal of the worms in the meteor was dropped and that was the point of all the events leading up to the end.
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My favourite last line of any book I've ever read (and that's different from an ending, I'll grant) is from Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man":
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rcorporon: Yes, I have read the book. I hated it, and the ending just sucked. The whole time they were torturing him, he fought and fought so hard for what he believed in. He was close, oh so very close, to winning (at least that's the feeling I got off of reading it), but then...he gives up. I was so frustrated after reading it that I couldn't stop venting my disgust for days. My cousin read it at the same time I did and both of us absolutely hated the ending. Every time someone mentioned that book, the first thing that would come out of our mouths was how much we hated the ending.
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I think the best ending I've ever read was in Ishiguro's novel, "The Remains of the Day." The entire book was easy to read, but not particularly gripping. It was just sort of steady, with occasional truly beautiful moments to keep the reader's interest. More than once I wondered to myself, "What's the point of this story of a butler's life?"
Then came the end, and it was brilliant. Very subtle, and yet everything came together at once in this beautiful tale of loss and reflection, and I loved it.
Another great ending was in Murakami's "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World."
As far as bad endings go... perhaps "Heart of Darkness"? I know it's a classic, and in fact I've read it twice (once within the past year), but the ending must not have been very interesting because for the life of me I can't recall a thing about it... The book did have some lovely prose, though.
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arriki, I was disappointed by the ending to SMILLA'S SENSE OF SNOW, too.
It made me wonder if the author was the type who doesn't use an outline and lets the story go wherever, and when it got so long, the author didn't know what to do with it, so he just let it peter out.
And he couldn't be bothered to rewrite it to make the ending work. <sigh!> Too bad, because the rest of it was quite good.
quote:rcorporon: Yes, I have read the book. I hated it, and the ending just sucked. The whole time they were torturing him, he fought and fought so hard for what he believed in. He was close, oh so very close, to winning (at least that's the feeling I got off of reading it), but then...he gives up. I was so frustrated after reading it that I couldn't stop venting my disgust for days. My cousin read it at the same time I did and both of us absolutely hated the ending. Every time someone mentioned that book, the first thing that would come out of our mouths was how much we hated the ending.
Shen,
You have to realize, he wasn't close to winning. He could never win, no matter how hard he fought. He was dead from the opening of the book, when he started to write his journal. Even he says it a number of times in the book.
I liked the fact that despite how helpless he was, he still fought, with all his might, until they finally broke him.
I take it you didn't like "The Trial" either then.
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The problem for me wasn't that he couldn't win. Tragedies kind of depend on the protagonist losing and sometimes having little effect on anyone. And it wasn't a shock that he died; that was obvious from the start.
The reason why I don't like 1984's ending was that there was just nobody left to care about. For me, the book stopped with the rat. Up until that point, Winston was still a living, functioning human being, but then it broke him, and his "death" was that he couldn't fight anymore. Everything after that was just dumb, because I didn't care about him, Julia, the chess game, the radio, what he was thinking (or not thinking, as the case may be.) None of it mattered. When they finally put the bullet in his head, I didn't care, because his actual death meant nothing. He wasn't special, just another tally on people that had to go. If you're going to actually kill someone, I need it to be important to me; all sympathy I had there was gone.
[This message has been edited by Ray (edited March 21, 2006).]
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Anyone read Steven King's "From a Buick 8"? Very unsatisfying ending. The whole book involves this state policemen wondering what mysterious horrible thing lives in the trunk of this abandoned car. 600 pages of this, I kept reading because it was Steven King but If I remember the ending correctly, NOTHING HAPPENED!
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Bad ending: Varley's "Titan," where after the protagonists struggle through the huge space entity / whatever that has attacked and imprisoned and practically destroyed them, they reach the nexus of the entity---and the entity offers them jobs as troubleshooters and they accept. I found that so unbelievable that I pretty much gave up on Varley as worth reading after that---certainly I never read any sequels. (Been a long time since I read it---my memory may play me false on some details. But my reaction is authentic.)
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Ico - I think the ending of "Heart of Darkness" is the best thing about it.
I men that in a good way. The counterpoint between what the narrator (mea culpa, but I forget his name) tells Kurtz' fiancee - "His last thoughts were of you" - and Kurtz' actual death scene - "The horror! The horror!" - are layered with and against one another that it just gets me every time.
OK, then the "actual" end is just them all sitting on the boat realising the sun has set, but even that has a great deal of meaning, in the context of what's gone before.
I actually found it quite hard work getting to the end, even though it's actually a pretty short work. But once you get there, for me, it's like realising that it's just so much bigger and deeper and scarier than you thought it was. All very "do not look into the abyss..." and all that Nietzschean stuff.
quote:I have friends who didn't like the end of JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL, but I thought it was okay.
I actually thought the end was most interesting part about it. I got bored with a lot of stuff in the first 2/3 of the book, but I revived again once I got to the end.
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"Heart of Darkness" describes something that, I gather, actually happened---at least as far as the background and some specific events go. Even the character of Kurtz may be based on a real person. Conrad just strung them together. (If some English teacher insists on reading some symbolic meaning into it, research the history of what was then called the Congo Free State. Look for a book titled "King Leopold's Ghost.")
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The ending that made me tear my hair out was Arthur C. Clarke's book "2061." After tying every thread up into a neat little package, the last line in the book was: "...and the Monolith awoke for the second time."
That line left me gasping, "How could you DO that to me??? You can't just end the book HERE!!"
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A big "dud" for me was - I Know This Much is True. The MC is dragged through endless (and boring) handwringing exercises and unfortunate circumstances. What a terrible waste of trees, time and efort. If you're going to write a 900+ page tome, it ought to be something substantial like - War and Peace or - Crime and Punishment = not about some twit wading through endless pages of drivel. The book was really a 200-300 page story inflated to 900 pages and much the worse for it. Easily one of the worst books I've ever read.
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Steinbeck is the most consistant story teller I know of with respect to endings. Salinger and Heller are good, but there aren't too many other writers I can think of who can tell a compelling story, and still have the last two pages of the book throw the entire work into relief. East of Eden, In Dubious Battle, Grapes of Wrath, even Sweet Thursday and To an Unknown God are stories told well in this regard.
John Irving is also a great plotter of books, but since I find his subject matter more puerile, I have a greater respect for Steinbeck.
As far as OSC goes, Hart's Hope shines in an especially compelling way, because of the way in which it ends giving the choice to the reader.
[This message has been edited by Tanglier (edited May 08, 2006).]
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Wait, Winston got shot at the end of 1984? I thought that was a hallucenation/image of what would have happened should he resist more. Besides, if he had gotton shot, it would have been much less tragic(not the right word) because then he could at least claim he won.
The worst ending is the Chrysilids by some poor sap who's name I have gladly forgotten. Basically, the protagonists are trapped between xenophobes and mutants, and are saved by kiwi's with silly string. a lot of silly string.
Sure, he builds up to the ending. But still, if you're going to have a rock-hard place ending, the characters need to solve the problem, not the random people who just showed up because they heard a psycic baby scream...
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if you want effective endings, read Shakespeare.
dont know about the others, but a book that really ticked me was (gasps) Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix. all that the book stood to accomplish, in my opinion, was to tell us that Harry had to kill Voldemort. come on! we knew that after the first book.
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Fast Cat wrote: Anyone read Steven King's "From a Buick 8"? Very unsatisfying ending. The whole book involves this state policemen wondering what mysterious horrible thing lives in the trunk of this abandoned car. 600 pages of this, I kept reading because it was Steven King but If I remember the ending correctly, NOTHING HAPPENED!
Yes, I've read it- several times - and it is a great book. It got me back to reading King again because it is classic King (along with "Cell", which I didn;t like as much).
There's a LOT that goes on in "From A Buick 8". For one thing, there's the whole kid coming of age thing that's going on behind the scenes. Then there's the whole mystery of why weird stuff happens around this old Buick the staties have in their garage out back. That's linked to the whole mystery of the stuff that apparently comes out of that Buick on occasion and why it comes out and how.
Who sent the Buick? Is it really an inter-dimensional doorway? What happens to the people who apparently get sucked through that doorway? Who was the Buick's original driver and what happened to him/it? What was the final thing that came out of the Buick? Why did the Buick go quiescent from time to time and then explode in a paroxysm (sp?) of activity? What was the Buick's connection with the tragic accidents that surrounded those who spent to much time with it?
Over and over and over. Question upon question.
The really dissatisfying thing is that King leaves most of these questions unanswered, but does give some heavy implied answers in the end.
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not commenting on endings (good or bad) but i just had to mention that, unlike nitewriter above, i absolutely loved "i know this much is true" and it is one of my favorite books
just because a book is about regular life, and not politics and war, and only has a handful of characters, as opposed to "war and peace"'s hundreds does not mean the telling of the story cannot be epic
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A book with a surprising, and yet...not surprising ending would be Timothy Zahn's _Icarus Hunt_. It's not something that you'd expect, and yet at the same time...Zahn hinted at it enough that when it happened, you're just like "Oh...that's how it happened..."
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Worst Endings: The Amber Spyglass-The whole theme of the trilogy was that Eve was right to go with temptation, and then at the end Eve2 has to resist temptation. The ending just killed the whole theme for me. Shadow of the Giant-Leaves Bean's last kid hanging. Would have worked if the kid was somehow linked to the other books in Ender's series, but unless OSC plans to write more then I think it's pointless.
Best Endings: Harry Potter 6-Unlike everyone else, I'm glad she killed Dumbledoor. Now Harry has to think for himself... maybe. On second thought, she should have killed Hermione too. Star Wars-I know it's a movie series, but I really like how Anakin finally did fulfill his destiny, and that the most evil looking guy turned out to be the hero.
Also, about 1984. I never managed to read the whole thing. I found the big plot devise that was newspeak to be completely unbelievable. The whole thing was about reducing word count so people couldn't express anti-government things, but then the prefix/suffix structure allowed for just as much vocabulary anyway, so the word reduction wouldn't do anything.
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The Chyrsalids was writted by John Whyndam (sp?). I love his novels (especially Day of the Triffids.)
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Just a random note. My Lit teacher is a huge fan of King, and he informed us that'From A Buick 8'was pushed on a deadline that he told the publisher that he couldn't make. They insisted and he wrote one of his most pointless books just to irk them.
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now, going back to the other Harry Potter books, I realize that Dumbledore was hinting all along that He wont live to the end...
anyway, a horrible ending I just read was Harry Potter 5. all that did was kill Black, and tell the Ministry the truth. She could have done that with a much shorter book.
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For me, there is only one best ending (and I'm not going to give it away, either):
The BEST ending I have ever read, is the end of Necroscope by Brian Lumley. It's not my favorite book, but I liked it a lot. However, the end of it satisfied me to the point of pondering the brilliance of the ending (twist to the ending) for a long time. Something CLICKED in my brain. I started thinking along a whole new line.
There are many disappointments, but I'll only name a few:
Tailchaser's Song by Tad Williams I liked his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series--though it was a bit winded.
The Axman Cometh by John Farris. I have not since read another of his books.
Four Past Midnight by Stephen King
The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited March 10, 2007).]
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