Ambuguity vs Completion in Endings

That brings me to the question of whether you can have a happy ending and an ambiguous one at the same time. I think you can. I don’t mean the stupid form of ambiguousity, in which the Hero turns to the Heroine and says, “Shall we marry? Or will you take the ship and begin your life as a pirate?” and she laughs and says, “I’ll decide tomorrow.” That’s only any good if your Tomorrow begins Book 2. I don’t mean the kind of ending that leaves plot questions dangling like unraveling threads in a cheap shirt. I mean the kind of ambiguity that arises because the joy is so inexplicably intertwined with sorrow, the kind of ending that acts like an ouroboros worm, tying the end to the beginning in a shocking way that changes how you see the entire story.

In the Lord of the Rings, the Ring is destroyed at the end, and Sauron thrown down, and the great battle won. The main story question of whether Frodo would succumb to Ring was also answered, in a shocking way, but with no room for doubt. So it doesn’t meet Scott Bailey’s rules for endings, which are as follows:

1. Avoid summing up, or grand statements of theme.
2. Avoid tying up plot threads. I am bored by denouements that tell you how every character in the book’s life will turn out beyond the last pages of the book. (I shake my fist at you, Mr. Tolkien and your Scouring of the Shire!)
3. Avoid cliches and pats on the reader’s head.
4. Avoid an ending the reader will expect.
5. Avoid a complete sense of closure.

I disagree with several of these, not for all forms of literature, but for my story. I think an epic fantasy which doesn’t tie up plot threads is annoying (of course, I loved the Scouring of the Shire, so there); and I suspect I am favorably inclined toward grand statements of theme. I tend to be obvious that way, even when I try to be sly and subtle. Of course, I want to avoid an ending the reader expects, yet for me that ought to be done will still allowing a sense of closure.

I am aware of other possibilities, which I find interesting, though I’m not sure it is something I can use at the moment. There’s a lovely interview of RB at the end of my kindle edition of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. She said had this to say about endings:

…more and more, I have the sense that the endings that work most powerfully on me are passages that might as well be beginnings, that seem to open up more than they close down. And I think this has to do with the way those types of endings allow for the reader to keep a story alive in her imagination, her thoughts, even after the final words. I envision the ending of a story as the point at which I complete the process of handing the story over to the reader. It belongs to her by then. It’s common for people to recommend starting stories mid-action or in media res, but there’s at least as good an argument for ending them that way too. There’s a kind of generosity to not closing a story down entirely, a way that includes the reader, and I aspire to that. Of course, like so much else, it’s a tough balance to get right. Leave the wrong ends loose and it can feel like the exact opposite, ungenerous.

I love that idea, of ending the story in media res. Not in the sense of leaving a cliff-hanger (I’ve quite a few of those, but at some point there needs to be a sense of completion!) but as though the reader has joined the character on the road, walked alongside him for a while, and then causally parted ways. It’s something I think works better for short stories than novels, and almost by definition, it is more fitted to Character Based Fiction than to Plot Based Fiction. A story about a bank heist might end with the characters riding off into the sunset to rob more banks, but the heist itself is done–if it were not, that would feel “ungenerous.”

I intend to mull it over. Perhaps I shall try to do something along those lines in another work.