Shvetali Thatte: "Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: The Perfect Ending"

Dear Vina Jie-Min Prasad: The Perfect Ending

By Shvetali Thatte

It’s difficult to decide what makes the ending of a fictional text “satisfying” because it’s entirely dependent on personal taste. Some people want happy endings while others prefer sad or dramatic ones. Personally, I appreciate books that have an ending which is completely unconventional and leaves you open-mouthed. If I see the ending coming, I’m probably going to be disappointed, and that is perhaps why there are so few books that I truly love the ending of.

That being said, We Were Liars is definitely an outlier because I absolutely love that book and its ending. If I could meet E. Lockhart, I would praise him indefinitely. Never before has an ending left me so unsettled that I could not do anything after finishing the story. I just sat there, on my bed, with my mouth wide open. The entire book had been slightly perplexing and the characters may not have been perfect, but that ending was all the book needed. It messed with my mind and teared up my emotions, leaving me a wreck.

As Alex Bernard puts in his blog, “the last few chapters deliver a shock that jolts the spine, gooses the bumps, and I’m not crying; I just have something in both of my eyes!”  It’s as if the entirety of the story appears to be a normal mystery, but then the ending is unimaginable. You’re left questioning everything you thought was true and your brain is spinning from all the shocks Lockhart keeps throwing at you.

Okay, so clearly, I enjoyed the book We Were Liars. No doubt, I can rant about it for many words straight. That wasn’t the point of my post, though. I wanted to talk about what makes an ending exceptional in general. Now, I’m pretty sure most people would agree with me that cliché endings are very overrated. They’re too predictable and fairly boring and unrealistic. This is why for me, the best endings are the most creative, surprising, and crazy ones; they mess with your head to the extent that you can’t forget about the book, even after you’ve attempted to put it away on your bookshelf. Perhaps I’m wrong, but I feel as though the general consensus is for an ending to offer closure. Readers like to feel as if all the pieces have come together at the end, and while I can sympathize with these readers, I personally do not agree with their beliefs. 

In my opinion, closure doesn’t necessarily mean knowing everything because, let’s be real, if the characters in the novel are meant to come to life, then their story can’t just end when the author claims it does. It’s going to keep going and for that reason, I think endings should be meant to allow the story to continue, just in the reader’s mind instead of on paper. For example, with the 17-year old in We Were Liars, if the author had ended the story without a twist, the character would have had a happy, normal ending. However, the truth is, no one’s life ends at the age of 17 in a very happy manner. Life is going to continue throwing curve balls at the person, and I want to be left with another curve ball thrown. I don’t want the author telling me how the character deals with it because I want to be left worrying about the character, allowing my mind to paint the picture I imagine.

So, this is my spiel on what I think is the perfect ending. There’s no magic formula, of course. The whole point is for the ending to be new, and if I’ve seen it before even if it is a plot twist, it’s definitely not going to be a satisfying ending for me because how will it be memorable? I don’t want an ending that makes me go “Aww, that was cute.” I want an ending that leaves me hanging with a million questions; I want an ending that makes me continue the characters’ story in my head because that is the kind of ending that will make any sort of fiction beautiful to me.