Narratives Need An Ending

 While whipping "Road Tripping" into a novella from chapters in a planned novel, I had two problems in my mind. First, was making sure I did not deviate so far from the novel that I could not fit the text back into it and to make it self-contained enough to stand on its own. The second problem was an ending, which was connected to the more general problems of number one, a wanted a conclusion to the story being told that did not solve the longer story. We will see if I have succeeded. These are problems not mention - so far - by my readers. They a multitude of other problems!

Anyway, Ted Gioia's Audiences Grow Weary of Stories that Never End hits on what bothers me about my own story:

“It is one of the great charms of books that they have to end,” writes literary critic Frank Kermode in his sagacious study The Sense of an Ending.

Kermode was obsessed with endings. But we all are, he insists.

We begin reading (or watching) a story with the sure expectation that it will come to an end. These endings have changed over the centuries—Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) pursues a very different form of closure than, say, Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962) or Polanski’s Chinatown (1974). But each is effective in its own way.

Stories without closure collapse into unruly chronos—the passage of time reduced to, in Kermode’s words, “one damn thing after another.” But that chaotic narrative-without-destination is increasingly the norm in contemporary storytelling.

Even when an auteur tries to disrupt audience expectations—as do Godard and Polanski, or others in different idioms such as Robbe-Grillet or David Chase—they can only achieve the shock value they are seeking because audiences desire closure. Without that expectation of resolution, even avant-garde works lose their sting.

Just consider those instances in which a writer (or other artist) dies before a major work was completed. From Mozart’s Requiem to Berg’s Lulu, the rules of composition changed enormously. But in both instances, others felt compelled to step in and finish an uncompleted work.

We just can’t stand to leave things of this caliber unresolved. We feel cheated.

My protagonist has reached the point where he sees he needs to find a purpose for his life. What that solution is remains in the future. I think for the story, he now knows what the solution looks like. The only way to know if he found a purpose, the proper purpose, is have him die. I hope that is a sufficient ending. Otherwise, the whole venture collapses.

The article is actually about Netflix and Disney/Marvel mangling their output so to have a steady stream of "content" rather about writing. I suggest reading the whole of the critique for both writers, and film buffs.  Mr. Gioia may have hit on why I feel no compulsion to see any of the new Marvel movies:

There is, of course, a solution to all this. The movie moguls could return to holistic storytelling. They could build their offerings with aesthetically pleasing beginnings, middles, and ends. If those basic storytelling principles were good enough for Shakespeare, they ought to be good enough for Disney CEO Bob Iger.

Studio bosses will tell you that they can’t make money that way. There’s no cash in closure, they’ll insist—in a refrain that oddly reminds me of Big Pharma preferring to treat diseases instead of curing them. Recurring cash flow is the goal, baby! And more today than ever before.

But if the current rumblings of discontent get much worse, the moguls may have no choice. And if they continue to ignore the basic psychology of audiences, those studio heads might achieve a different kind of closure—but to their careers, in this case.

 sch 3/11