Life is definitely not a fairy tale. And I’m fully aware that not all endings are happy. That’s life but it’s not OK. Not even a little bit.
So many events and so many people we can’t control, but I just wish we could try a bit harder to end a few things halfway in tune, if not on a full chord of happiness. Real life can be depressing, but at least what we read and watch on TV could be uplifting. Is that too much to ask?
Growing up, I was a privileged recipient of Jack and Jill magazine each month. Every single cover was happy. The March issue might showcase an incredibly delighted little boy chasing after a colorful kite, while the July cover was invariably patriotic. It would probably have something to do with bicycles, flags, parades, and watermelon. It was an escape. No matter what was going on at school, no matter how much I dreaded some upcoming event, no matter what—Jack and Jill was happy and vibrant and totally predictable and very unrealistic. Life wasn’t.
So then on to high school and literature and classics. I wonder what makes a classic classic? Is it the tough-to-follow plot that ends in some weird twist of misfortune that leaves you absolutely bummed? I think that has to be it.
There are a few exceptions to that rule, I guess, but the first bad-ender that comes to mind is Lord of the Flies. What is that? An online review calls it “a dramatization of the conflict between the civilizing instinct and the barbarizing instinct that exists in all human beings.” It goes on to suggest a struggle between the ordered aspects of society and the chaotic elements of humanity’s savage animal instincts. Well that’s a promising bedtime read right there.
I read that one in Ms. Reynolds’ 11th grade classroom on the second floor of Coffee High School. My book report was sort of short and I don’t think she liked it much, but that pig head on a stake surrounded by buzzing flies is seared into my psyche and I just had no words. Still don’t. I hope she’s happy.
I got lucky and was able to skip Of Mice and Men, but my daughter bears the scars of that one. She can recount in detail her disappointment at the way the story ends with the two friends being cornered, facing such certain death that the one who is not mentally challenged shoots to death his unsuspecting mentally ill friend to save the friend from a worse fate. That seems like a pretty poor outcome to me, so I’m not sure what could be much worse, but I’m sure I’d understand it if I had been forced to read and critically analyze it.
One reviewer subtitled that one “The Impossibility of the American Dream.” OK. Now I’m inspired.
One of my favorites, although it also ends badly, is The Great Gatsby. I’m not kidding. I really do like that one. It could be that I didn’t read the book but watched the movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, but most likely it’s just that I’m an F. Scott Fitzgerald fan. Even so, I just don’t see why Jay Gatsby couldn’t have run away with Daisy and left the mansion to his friends in organized crime. I know she’s a bubble head but at least he would have been happy. He could have just followed that weird green light at the end of his pier into a life of bliss where he wasn’t intent on impressing everybody.
I made the mistake of reading Where the Red Fern Grows because it was about dogs and I really liked dogs. If only I’d known that it ended with a favorite dog dying from injuries sustained fighting off a mountain lion to save his owner, while the surviving dog grieves beside the first dog’s grave until she herself dies a few days later. Now that one was uplifting. If only I’d chosen All Creatures Great and Small instead. Live and learn.
At least I didn’t waste time reading Old Yeller, although I did by mistake watch the Disney movie. Did Old Yeller just have to get in the fight and contract rabies so that Travis had to shoot his own dog? Could there not have been a bit better ending, like maybe Old Yeller dies of old age in his sleep on the couch in the living room? I would have been just as entertained and not haunted for a lifetime.
Some of us have watched Old Yeller and some of us haven’t. There are definitely two camps The scarred and the unscarred.
You might want to steer clear of William Faulkner, too. That is, unless you enjoy incredibly lengthy sentences and a whole lot of undercurrents that your English instructor is sure to ask you to uncover.
“From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air…”
I’m no English scholar, but that has got to be representative of Miss Coldfield’s suppressed anger at her father, while the autumnal season suggests the death of an era. Of course, sundown, or fading light, is indicative of fading hope as her life nears its end and she has yet to realize any of the dreams that would have been possible had she acted on her talents and aspirations.
I’m no slouch when it comes to throwing words at a subject of which I know absolutely nothing.
If it were up to me, Scarlett and Rhett would have gotten back together, moved to Tara, planted a garden each spring, and raised racehorses. And Jack would have crawled up on that floating door with Rose and survived the Titanic.
Any book called Hunger Games is off my list, as is anything Stephen King. I know how Cold Mountain ends so I’m not even picking that one up. And finally, what makes Nicholas Sparks think that somebody always has to die?
It’s not impossible to end something well. Little Women ends with the sisters and parents and in-laws enjoying a garden party in the spring, while the children chase each other through the blooming apple orchard. I know Beth dies, but at least that’s not at the ending, so you have time to get over that before the curtain drops. I’ve yet to see an unhappy Hallmark movie, and Pride and Prejudice shows off a happy marriage for a change.
But then, after all the debauchery, partying, regrets, and wasted lives that Hemingway portrays in The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist muses “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?” He’s reflecting on what might have been, had the right choices been made, but what never would be
I agree. Just because life doesn’t always go well doesn’t mean there can’t be a few more happy endings. Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so?
