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?
Amy,
ReplyDeleteThe 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