Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Amy Wang: "Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Happy Endings Aren't Always Good Endings"


Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: Happy Endings Aren’t Always Good Endings
By Amy Wang

*Spoilers for The Last Unicorn ahead. You have been warned.




Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever; a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.
            -Peter S. Beagle

Call them horned goats or bearded rhinoceri if you will, but unicorns in all their immortal majesty and grace make everyone and everything else pale in comparison. Peter S. Beagle’s eponymous monoceros from his 1968 masterpiece, The Last Unicorn, is no exception.

Speaking of The Last Unicorn, I recently had the pleasure of perusing this high-fantasy work, and ultimately, its ending left a deep impression on me. Whenever I think about the last several pages, I invariably replay the scenes in my mind and marvel at just how skillfully Beagle executes them. After all, in my book, a good ending never goes unappreciated.

Over the course of the novel, particularly towards its conclusion, Beagle pulls you along on unforeseen twists, turns, and detours. Take Prince Lir, for example. He acts as a human shield for Lady Amalthea, the unicorn-turned-human, only to be run down by the Red Bull into a bloody pulp. Twice. And then impaled by its horns.

Oh, you thought he was dead? Wrong. A couple pages later, he hurls himself back into harm’s way and finally gets flattened into a corpse. At the time, I couldn’t believe that Beagle had killed off the prince of all characters, especially in such a brutally horrifying and postponed way. And you would think that for Prince Lir’s devotion and valiance, he would get the girl after coming back to life.

Sadly, nope. She turns back into a unicorn and gallops back to her forest, where she stays put for the next eternity (way to dump your boyfriend).

However, in all seriousness, Beagle’s freewheeling style of writing defies archetypes such that it suggests your typical ending until the very last millisecond, when he reminds you nothing is typical at all. The trick is leading you on and putting a spin on what constitutes the “proper” ending shortly thereafter.

Besides playing with your expectations and other elements of the collective unconscious, Beagle does a fantastic job with character development, making for an ending that has clear displacement from the beginning. The story culminates in a much-anticipated boss battle, with the unicorn squaring off against the Red Bull and confronting her forgotten memories.

Overall, I love how the ending addresses both a physical and mounting emotional/mental struggle. This duality underscores the growing complexity of the characters as they conquer their inner demons and deliver on the long-waited epic showdown between good and evil.

In like manner, dynamism and forward movement stem from the after effects of the showdown, an easily overlooked but incredibly important component of compelling endings. Once the immediate danger has been vanquished and the dust has settled, we see that victory often comes at great expense. Main characters change, for better or worse, to accommodate the sacrifices they’ve made. For instance, the unicorn, having temporarily lived as a human, gains human emotions like joy and sorrow, at the cost of remembering her regrets forever. It’s a pretty heavy fate to resign herself to, yet the evident growth in the unicorn’s character flavors it with all the more bittersweetness.

Needless to say, I love sugar, spice, and everything nice as much as the next person. Let’s face it; we’re all guilty of indulging ourselves against our voices of reason at some point.


Case in point: who hates cake?

But as much as we might binge on what makes us happy, balance, like in the culinary arts, distinguishes great from good endings. Flavor profiles dictate that sour and bitter palates temper the cloying sweetness of an overly happy ending. Which means authors don’t have to do right by all the characters, and that closing the curtains on an ambiguous or objectively terrible fate maybe isn’t so terrible after all.

I personally appreciate when works of fiction acknowledge that not everything goes as planned in life, fictional or real. Diversifying outcomes for various characters, as a result, makes the finale much more multifaceted, rather than black-and-white. That, along with flying in the face of readers’ expectations and demonstrating forward movement, is makes the ending of The Last Unicorn so exemplary. So, who’s to say happy endings are necessarily good ones?

1 comment:

  1. Amy,

    The analogy of sour and bitter as contrasts to sweet makes sense, as fiction is often a matter of almost literal taste in much the same way as food is. Each story is its own recipe, and authors have the opportunity to adapt those recipes to suit their own palates and the palates of their imagined readers.

    I suppose it's possible to over-indulge in almost anything, even the bitter end of the spectrum. (She said, side-eyeing her goth phase in high school...)

    Best,
    TT

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