That’s how a downbeat ending can carry with it a moral message. Gatsby’s demise was caused by his going after the wrong things, such as massive wealth (through bootlegging) and another man’s wife. He paid for it.
And in doing so, Fitzgerald awakens us to the futility of the same pursuits.
Tragedy and Catharsis
In classic Greek drama, the tragedy served to create what Aristotle called catharsis, meaning purification or cleansing. While academics get doctorates unpacking what Aristotle meant, it seems to me the object was to get the audience to avoid destructive passions, thus strengthening the state for survival. Professor Rufus Fears put it this way in an essay on the Greek tragedy Alcestis:
The purpose of . . . tragedy was to awaken in you the emotions of fear and pity and, thereby, to achieve a catharsis—a purging of those emotions, as when you eat too many prunes—to cleanse you so you could then, without fear and pity, make decisions. (Fears, J. Rufus, Life Lessons from the Great Books, The Great Courses, 2009).
A downbeat ending should operate in a similar way. We feel relieved that we do not suffer the fate of the Lead. And are “warned” in a way so that we can avoid the same demise. Ray Bradbury, author of the dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451, was once asked why he wrote stories that predicted the future. He replied, “I don’t try to predict the future. I try to prevent it.”
This Lead Loses ending is common in classic film noir and hardboiled fiction.
Think of the doomed lovers in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. In both plots the question is, Will they get away with murder?
And let’s face it, there is a part of us—the part that needs the warning—that in some way hopes they do get away with it. Why? Because Cain is able to create sympathy for them. This creates cross-currents of emotion which is one of the hallmarks of better-than-average fiction.
As Postman draws to a close, the lovers, Frank and Cora, seal their love, in part because Cora is now pregnant.
We got married at the City Hall, and then we went to the beach. She looked so pretty I just wanted to play in the sand with her, but she had this little smile on her face, and after a while she got up and went down to the surf.
“I’m going out.”
She went ahead, and I swam after her. She kept on going, and went a lot further out than she had before. Then she stopped, and I caught up with her. She swung up beside me, and took hold of my hand, and we looked at each other. She knew, then, that the devil was gone, that I loved her.
But fate has other ideas. Worrying about a possible miscarriage, Frank drives hard toward a hospital, but when he tries to pass a truck he hits a wall and everything goes black.
When I came out of it I was wedged down beside the wheel, with my back to the front of the car, but I began to moan from the awfulness of what I heard. It was like rain on a tin roof, but that wasn’t it. It was her blood, pouring down on the hood, where she went through the windshield. Horns were blowing, and people were jumping out of cars and running to her. I got her up, and tried to stop the blood and in between I was talking to her, and crying, and kissing her. Those kisses never reached her. She was dead.
Frank is put on trial for faking an accident to murder Cora, so he could have all the money they’d absconded with. He’s convicted and sent to the death house. The book ends thus:
Here they come. Father McConnell says prayers help. If you’ve got this far, send up one for me, and Cora, and make it that we’re together, wherever it is.
So a downbeat ending, where the Lead loses everything, often is based upon a rough but inevitable justice. Which is why they can be among the most powerful endings in literature.
The shape of a Lead Loses ending:
Death stakes in the final battle.
The Lead loses, meaning he dies either physically, professionally, or psychologically when he fails to gain his objective.
A moral lesson is taken away (catharsis).
3. The Lead Sacrifices
What is the most famous ending of all time?
I’ll cast my vote for Casablanca. It is certainly has one of the great last lines: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Based on a play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s, Casablanca was brought to the screen by Warner Bros. as a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart. (That it was seriously considered for Ronald Reagan is a matter of historical dispute.)
It’s the story of Rick Blaine, American, operating a cafe/saloon in the city of Casablanca during World War II. French Morocco is under the authority of the Nazi-controlled Vichy government. The local police, headed by Captain Louis Renault, allow Rick to conduct his business (which includes a gambling room) because Rick professes absolute neutrality . . . and because Louis gets a kickback from the gambling, and procures desperate women at the cafe for his “little romances” (in return for which he gives the women and their husbands the papers necessary to get out of Casablanca).
Why is Rick such a loner? We don’t find out until the past comes back to his present in the form of the one woman he ever truly loved—Ilsa Lund. She’s with her husband, the heroic underground fighter, Victor Laszlo.
In a flashback we learn why Rick is so embittered. He and Ilsa had fallen in love in Paris just before the occupation by the Nazis. Ilsa thought that her husband, Laszlo, had died in a concentration camp. She finds out she was wrong, at just the time Rick proposes marriage.
She tells Rick she’ll meet him at the train station for the last train out. Instead she writes a note to Rick, telling him she cannot come with him but to know she’ll always love him.
Now, here she is, in Casablanca. With the police and the Nazis determined to keep Laszlo from escaping their grasp.
Intrigue happens (that’s how to summarize a plot!). But you all know the movie.
Let’s analyze.
First, what is this movie all about? It’s about the resurrection of a man named Rick Blaine. He goes from embittered isolation to sacrificial hero. Thus, these beats are clear in the movie:
Argument against transformation
In Act 1, Rick says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.” He shows this by refusing to step in and help the oily con artist Ugarte from certain execution.
Rick’s argument is found in those words. It’s not worth ever sticking your neck out for anybody but yourself, results be damned.
Mirror Moment
We discussed this earlier. Rick has a visual moment of self-loathing after drunkenly resisting Ilsa’s need to explain what happened in Paris. He knows he’s a louse.
The second half of the movie asks, Will Rick recover his humanity?
Foreshadowing the ending
There are moments before Act 3 when Rick shows small signs that he might be moving toward humanity again. Two of them stand out.
One is when the Nazis in the cafe start singing a German song and Victor Laszlo stands up and asks the orchestra to play the free French anthem. The head of the orchestra looks to Rick for a sign of what to do.
Rick nods his okay.
The second incident involves a desperate young woman whose husband is losing all their money in the gambling room, money they need to buy papers to get out. Louis Renault has offered her his normal bargain—sleep with him, and she’ll have the papers.
Intrigue follows, until at the end Rick is at the airport with Ilsa, who looks remarkably like Ingrid Bergman, and she’s ready to leave her husband and go away with him.
But then Rick stops and tells her no, this is wrong. If we go through with it we’ll regret it, maybe not now but soon and for the rest of our lives.
And yet: “We’ll always have Paris. Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Rick has sacrificed the thing he wants most in this world. He has done it for a higher good (no longer will he say, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”).
He’s also put his very life on the line, for he has killed the Nazi major in front of the French police captai
n, Louis.
But in a stunning reversal, Louis does not arrest Rick. Instead, moved by Rick’s moral courage, he himself sacrifices his position of power to go off and fight the Nazis with Rick.
What’s happened?
Rick, who has been living as an isolated dead man walking, has offered to sacrifice his life ... and has been resurrected.
The central message of sacrifice and resurrection is the shaping force of our civilization. Even if one is not religious it must be acknowledged that there is something in us that vitally responds to a sacrifice for the greater good.
Which is why Casablanca resonates.
And why sacrifice in fiction moves us.
Almost as if we’d been wired to receive it.
In the oldest Hindu text, Rigveda, we have the creation story of Purusha, a primal human who, through self-sacrifice (as in, body parts being separated!) became man and woman and, indeed, the stuff of the entire world.
In the Old Testament, Abraham offers Isaac in a test of faith. Isaac is symbolically raised from the dead, pre-figuring Christ, the atoning sacrifice for the whole world.
Four hundred years before Christ, the Athenian playwright Euripides wrote Alcestis. In this play a king named Admetus is due to kick the bucket. But he is given a gift by the gods––he does not have to die if he can find someone to take his place.
No one is anxious to step in for that particular service, except his wife, Queen Alcestis. She does this so her children will not be left fatherless and she a grieving widow. Plus, she knows he is a good king and the people need him.
Sacrifice.
Off she goes with Death, toward her eternal destiny.
Meanwhile, Heracles (the Greek name for Hercules, which is the Roman name for Steve Reeves), hears this sad tale and vows to battle Death and bring Alcestis back from the dead.
Which he does. He returns to the palace with a veiled Alcestis. King Admetus doesn’t know her at first. But then he lifts her veil and there she is. Interestingly, she cannot speak for three days, and then she is fully restored.
Sacrifice is powerful. Perhaps the reason is this: we know life is tough, and that to stand up for the good usually comes at a cost. Fictional characters who fight for what’s right are going to be wounded. Otherwise, the thing they’re standing up for isn’t all that important.
When they offer their lives, it is the ultimate sacrifice. If they survive, it is like a resurrection.
But even if they do not survive, there is still a resurrection. Their spirit will live on. Their sacrifice inspires others to change for the better and carry on the fight. Think of William Wallace in Braveheart. He can end his torture simply by confessing to treason. Instead he shouts, “Freedom!” just before the ax falls. His death inspires his followers, most notably Robert the Bruce, so they may all go on to fight like free men.
Or even the comedy Mister Roberts. The novel, play and movie (starring Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon and James Cagney) were huge successes, in large part because the ending hits us with a somber jolt that is followed by the rebirth of one Ensign Pulver.
We can list other examples. A Tale of Two Cities is notable for the self-sacrifice of Sydney Carton, who states, “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
Gran Torino, the film starring Clint Eastwood. He goes from being an entrenched bigot to offering his life to save a Hmong teenager and rid the neighborhood of a vicious gang.
You can see that the sacrificial ending works all over the place, in any type of fiction.
But even if you don’t end with a sacrifice, at least have the conflict of the novel cost the Lead something essential. He will then emerge as a different or stronger person at the close. That’s the essence of story in a nutshell.
The shape of The Lead Sacrifices ending:
Death stakes that lead to a moral dilemma.
Lead chooses to sacrifice what he wants most, even his life.
Lead is rewarded for his sacrifice, with either a surprising benefit (Casablanca) or by saving others and becoming a hero, even in death (Gran Torino).
4. The Lead “Wins” But Really Loses
When a Lead goes after an objective that is morally wrong or questionable, and gets it, then technically he’s “won.” The story question—will he gain the objective?—is answered affirmatively. But there is too great a price to be paid for the victory. Thus, for the Lead, the whole things turns into a net loss.
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is not really about Vito Corleone. Rather, it’s the story of Vito’s son, Michael, and his rise to power.
At the beginning of the book (and movie), Michael is a returning war veteran. He’s come home to marry his fiancé, Kay. At the big wedding of his sister, Connie, he assures Kay that he is not going to be part of the “family business.”
But that all changes when a rival, Solozzo, attempts to assassinate Michael’s father.
The attempt is unsuccessful, but Vito Corleone is barely hanging onto life. At the hospital, Michael (the smartest of the three brothers) immediately discerns that another assassination attempt is in the offing. His quick thinking frustrates the attempt, but as a result he runs afoul of a corrupt New York police captain. The captain smashes Michael’s face.
In the Corleone compound, Sonny, now leading the family, is hot, wants to go to war. Tom Hagen, the family consigliere, advises restraint.
All the while, Michael is sitting there, silent. In the movie, this is the Mirror Moment. You can see it visually. Michael is wondering who he is. Is he the good son, the one who told Kay he’s not going to get involved? Or will he take the unalterable step over to the criminal side?
He chooses the latter by coming up with a plan to kill both Solozzo and the police captain.
Once that’s done, he goes into hiding in Sicily.
When he returns to New York, it is to take control of the Corleone family and interests.
And to unleash hell on the other families.
His vendetta is a success. He wins.
But at what cost?
At the very end, Michael is confronted by his sister, Connie, who accuses him of ordering the hit on her husband, Carlo. He did, of course. But his wife, Kay, overhears Connie’s charge and when they are alone she asks him if it’s true.
Michael shook his head wearily. “Of course it’s not. Just believe me, this one time I’m letting you ask about my affairs, and I’m giving you an answer. It is not true.” He had never been more convincing. He looked directly into her eyes. He was using all the mutual trust they had built up in their married life to make her believe him. And she could not doubt any longer. She smiled at him ruefully and came into his arms for a kiss.
And so Michael has become the kind of man who can lie, without qualm, to his own wife. His soul is lost. (In the movie, there’s a perfect visual image at the end. Kay is standing outside Michael’s office and sees Clemenza and some others paying their respects. Clemenza kisses Michael’s hand and utters, “Godfather.” As he does, a man walks to the door. In the last shot we see Kay’s face as the door closes on it.)
The lose-while-winning type of ending is often in horror fiction. This is where you find the Faustian bargain (selling your soul to the devil) and see the cost of dabbling with darkness.
Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, like much of his fiction, has such an ending. The book concerns Louis Creed, a young doctor with a nice family who moves to a small town in Maine. And because this is a Stephen King town, there’s a piece of ground with mysterious powers. That ground is a pet cemetery (the sign is misspelled), and things buried there come back to life as zombie-like reanimations of themselves. Like Louis’s cat, which comes back after burial as a mouse-ripping, odoriferous feline.
When Louis’s two-year-old son, Gage, is killed by a truck, Louis secretly buries him in the pet cemetery. Big mistake. The kid comes back as a murdering monster. He snags a scalpel and kills Louis’s frie
nd, Jud and then kills his own mother. Not only that, the reanimated tyke has eaten some of her flesh.
Remember, this is Stephen King, not Barbara Cartland.
Louis has to kill his son with a fatal dose of morphine.
Now Louis is teetering on the edge of insanity (ya think?). He takes his wife to the burial ground, reasoning that he’d waited too long with Gage. His wife will come back and be okay!
Yeah, no.
Louis does win the battle over death. But he gets a zombie in return.
Too great a cost.
The shape of this ending:
The Death at stake is usually psychological death. The Lead is being drawn to the dark side.
The Lead makes the choice to fully embrace the immoral choice (often by refusing the admonition of a character urging him to do what is right, or to stop dealing with darkness.)
The dark objective is realized, but we see at the end, at the moral cost to the soul.
5. Open-Ended
If a book ends without the main plot being fully resolved, it’s called “open-ended.” That means it’s left to the reader to contemplate what happens after the last line. It will be something in the future, but what? There is more life to come, more character transformation.
This can frustrate a reader, which is why most bestselling fiction is unambiguous about the ending. A definite resolution is usually an implied guarantee in the reading contract. The reader has shelled out time and (usually) discretionary income to experience a story. If they make it all the way through, they’re hoping for closure. Bad guy gets his just desserts. Potential lovers end up together. Hero dies, but for a greater good. Crime doesn’t pay.
So is there a place for open-ended endings? Of course, but that place is usually in so-called literary fiction. As the noted editor Dave King put it in a Writer Unboxed blog column (4/18/2017):
But readers of mainstream and literary novels, who often read to experience real life, are a lot more likely to be suspicious of an ending that resolves things. The conflicts that infest people’s real lives rarely wrap up in nice, satisfying packages. The desire to capture this authentic experience may be why writers of literary novels often shy away from endings that actually end the story. And if the pain your characters go through shows your readers enough about the human condition to leave them thinking, you can sometimes get away without resolving your characters’ lives.
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