Composition II: April 30th 2002
Eva Heisler

Happy Endings

Nína Rúna Kvaran
What is it that makes a story a good story? Is it realistic character creation or solid settings? Is it perhaps a good storyline or an elaborate plot? Or is it maybe the disposition of the author or his or hers ability to combine all of the above that gives a piece of fiction the essentials to be a good one? Although being myself a ferocious and enthusiastic reader, I am nevertheless clueless as to what the correct answer to these questions is and somehow I doubt that they can be fully explained. Perhaps the mystery about what it exactly is that makes a piece of art a successful one, is in fact that it is mysterious to an extent so that it raises questions. But with everything else set aside it is common knowledge to all who indulge in reading fiction (or any piece of writing when it comes to that) that the beginning is very important. The beginning has to catch the reader’s interest so that he’ll be convinced to read on. But more important and perhaps the most crucial part is the ending. The ending is the last thing to be read and usually has the biggest impact on the reader simply because it’s what the reader is most likely to remember about the piece. Whether the ending is happy, sad or plain is not always the biggest issue, but whether it gives the reader a sense of closure. People tend to feel unsatisfied if they are simply left with a bunch of loose ends hanging in thin air.
In this essay I will be looking at a short story by Margaret Atwood called “Happy Endings”. The purpose is to do a close reading of the story with the basic idea of plot as a thematic content in mind.
“Happy Endings” is definitely not a short story of the conventional kind. It has quite an unusual structure. It starts with a three line introductory part that sets the reader up for what is to come next: “John and Mary meet. /What happens next? / If you want a happy ending, try A”. Then the rest of the piece is divided into six very short chapters marked A, B, C, D, E and F. Each chapter tells different versions of plots destined for the four characters mentioned: John, Mary, Madge and Fred.
If one opts for the happy ending and looks at chapter A, then one quickly realizes that there isn’t very much to say about it. The vocabulary is appropriately rich but diction is as if someone just wrote down a list of things to buy at the grocery shop. The chapter is a very short description of the happy and wonderful life John and Mary have together and it summarizes how perfect their existence is from beginning to end until they die. Of course nobody who has passed the primary school level would write a story like that even though the intention was to have a happy ending. There is no character creation, no point of view, little as no setting and no crisis. The first sentence “John and Mary fall in love and get married” is as overwhelmingly simplified as are the rest of the sentences in the chapter. It’s a deliberately simplified version of a perfect existence that is utterly uninteresting and boring because of its perfectness. That is perhaps the whole idea with chapter A. It shows you how useless it would be to write only about situations that go completely smoothly and people who never meet with any difficulties in their lives. Even though a story is elaborately written and prolonged with detailed description, nobody wants to read it if there is no crisis to be dealt with and no climax to it. It may be very nice and what everybody dreams of, to go through life without making mistakes and facing problems, but it’s not realistic and a story written like that offers no development of character and as a result no sympathy for the reader. It’s totally passionless and more importantly, there is no plot in it. That leads us back to what I mentioned before and that is that without some kind of plot there is no story, or at least no story really worth writing about.
Chapter B is much more elaborate than the first one although the diction has the same kind of dispassionate feeling to it. Strangely enough it continues to be almost robot-like even though the sentences are much longer and more complex than in chapter A. Now we have a sad ending instead of the happy ending before. Mary and John are in a completely different situation. She is in love with him but it’s not repaid and John treats her horribly. Although the chapter is very short we have at least some character description and the setting is Mary’s apartment, although the reader does not get a very visual image of the place.
John is “using her body for selfish pleasure and ego gratification of a tepid kind” so from the start we know that he’s an asshole. He takes her cooking, affection and sexual favors completely for granted and treats poor Mary with the utmost disrespect. She, on the other hand, seems to be a desperate and self-loathing person who diminishes herself in her relations with John in the faint hope of him eventually asking her to get married: “…surely he’ll get used to her, he’ll come to depend on her and they will get married…” Mary slowly deteriorates because of this relationship but refuses to take her friends’ advise about getting out of it. She continues to belief that deep down inside “is another John, who is much nicer”. Then one evening, John complains about Mary’s cooking and he has never done that before so that can be seen as a sign or a forewarning to something awful about to happen. The climax of the chapter is when Mary finds out that John has been seeing another woman called Madge and the fact that he takes that woman to a restaurant hurts her so deeply that she takes an overdose of pills and kills herself, all the while hoping that John will rescue, repent and marry her. The chapter ends with a short comment about John marrying Madge and everything continuing in their lives as it did in chapter A so eventually John and Madge die.
Chapter B is obviously much more interesting than chapter A even though it’s a depressing and unfair storyline. The characters are much better outlined; there are the images of setting in the apartment and the restaurant and most importantly there is a plot, a storyline. The story is plausible and realistic (not that that is a necessity for fiction) and it at least awakens some feelings of repulsion and sympathy for the characters, albeit it’s not crucial for the reader to necessarily identify with them. The sad ending also has its affect, creating pity for Mary and a feeling of rage towards John who gets away so easily and lives a happy life with Madge until his death, just as prescribed in chapter A. This plot works because it’s interesting enough to raise questions and keep the reader in some suspense about the fate of the characters.
In Chapter C the plot thickens and becomes much more complex. Now John is a desperate, bolding, older man, married to Madge but in love with 22-year-old Mary. Young Mary does not love him but sleeps with him on Thursday evenings because the young man she’s in love with, James, isn’t ready for a committed relationship. In this chapter the situation is reversed if compared to chapter B. Mary has sex with John simply because he’s her second choice and she can’t have what she really wants and since he’s an older man he can “keep it up longer”, so she uses him for her own gratification. In chapter C we have a much deeper character creation then in the other two chapters, at least when it comes to Mary and John. We have Mary, a young, inconsiderate woman who blatantly takes advantage of a man desperately in love with her. We have John, an older but seemingly harmless man going through some kind of midlife crisis and who turns out to be a killer. We have totally irresponsible James on his motorcycle that only wants to be free. Then we have Madge, John’s wife and Fred, the man she marries after John’s death. Maybe claiming that the character creation is much deeper is going too far, but at least we have some sort of character development in John as he surprisingly ends up murdering both Mary and James before committing suicide, because he had discovered them high on dope in bed together. He starts out as being the good guy that gets the readers sympathy but ends up being the one who controls the fate of all of them, even his wife, who after “a suitable period of mourning” marries a man called Fred and lives happily ever after until they both die as prescribed in chapter A.
In chapter C we also have more variety in the setting. Mary met John in their workplace, John has a charming house where his wife and two children reside and then Mary has her apartment. Of course the places are only mentioned and not carefully described but they give the reader a sense of surroundings never the less.
The plot is much more complex as I said before. We have the classic love-triangle which could be considered a love-rectangle if we include Madge. There is the tension in Mary’s and John’s relationship, as neither one is ready to commit to the other. John even repeats to Mary that he will not leave his wife, not realizing that Mary doesn’t really care and is just bored with him. Then there is the classic situation where the hypocritical betrayer (John) is betrayed (by Mary) that leads to the climax of the story. John seems to think that even though he himself cheats on his wife, he will not tolerate betrayal himself and in despair buys a handgun with the aforementioned results. Atwood admits that the handgun and killing part of the plot is a thin one but says that if a writer chooses to go by this chapter, that part of the plot can be dealt with later and refined to be more realistic. The chapter then ends with the main characters tragically dead and the eventual death of Madge and Fred as they live happily ever after. Even though chapter C is more detailed than B, it is written in the same matter-of-fact tone. This kind of writing style is somehow so impersonal that despite the fact that there are descriptions of how the characters think and what their dreams are, the reader will probably have difficulties sympathizing with them. The only points of view we get are in chapters B and C but they are not very detailed or deep inspections into the minds of the characters.
Chapter D is a kind of sequel to chapter C if somebody wants to add a little flavor to the “happily ever after” part of the remaining characters’ lives. Actually, I would say that this very short chapter is redundant because the whole plot of it seems very unrealistic and ridiculous, especially if it’s ment to be a sequel to chapter C that described a very believable situation that has often come true in real life.
Now Madge and Fred are living a happy life in their charming house by the seashore. But then, a giant tidal wave approaches but miraculously they both escape and there is a final image of them: “Finally on high ground they clasp each other, wet and dripping and grateful, and continue as in A”. Here there is a freak natural phenomenon that decides the fates of the characters and controls the plot, making it a tad bit difficult to swallow except for the more adventurous readers. Of course they then both live happily ever after and then die.
Chapter E is an even shorter one, offering an option of a little more drama and a sad ending instead of a happy one. Now Fred has a bad heart and “the rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies”. Then Madge devotes herself to charity work until she dies. Atwood also brings about the idea of a slightly more bitter storyline were Madge has cancer, they both feel guilty and confused and Fred assumingly devotes himself to bird watching after Madge’s death until he dies himself. Atwood’s latter option is so briefly described that she only gives the keywords “Madge”, “cancer”, “guilty and confused” and “bird watching”. There’s no setting in this chapter and only a rough sketch of character development but surly both Fred and Madge would mature going through the experience of fatal illness.
There is one very interesting thing that is perhaps worth to note and that is the frequent mentioning of real estate values going up or down. In chapter A, they buy a charming house and just then real estate values go up, as to emphasis their fortune and good luck. In chapter C John and Madge bought their charming house just before real estate values went up and in chapter D real estate values go down as the tidal wave approaches, as to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. I don’t know exactly what the intention of Atwood is by this but the real estate business does give the stories a kind of middle-class, suburban atmosphere to them.
And that is were chapter F comes into view. It offers a slightly different setting for those who think the other chapters are too “bourgeois”. John could be a revolutionary and Mary a counterespionage agent, but no matter what you do, Atwood reminds, you will always still end up with A.
Atwood’s conclusion seems to be that no matter what kind of ending you choose, you’ll always end up with the same thing. She exclaims that all endings that even try to be different from the ending she says is the only authentic one, that is, that John and Mary die (thrice repeated for emphasis), are fake endings. I didn’t really know what to think of this when I read it for the first time. Of course people eventually die so that shouldn’t even have to be mentioned. But perhaps that is what Atwood is trying to say, that the ending isn’t the most important thing. She says that beginnings are much more fun but people of good taste will always have their eyes on the thing in between, the most difficult thing to write, the plot. But if the plot is just a sequel of one thing after another, as it seems to be in all the plots that she gives in this story, then something is missing. I think that she is saying that how and why the plot develops, is more important than what actually happens at the end of the story.
I also think that it’s vital not to take this story too seriously and I’m sure Atwood would agree with that. She is first and foremost playing with the classical and very overused form that is so popular in Hollywood’s romantic sector and romance novels; the Jane Austin-like theme of “boy meets girl” etc. She is both making fun of it in her own way and at the same time perhaps commenting on how difficult it is to be original in art creation. It’s just very hard to stay away from the clichés and formulas and be a little spunky. Not only is it problematic because you need to possess imaginative, artistic, creative and original talent to write good fiction but it’s also very difficult because a huge number of fiction lovers unfortunately don’t appreciate what you’re doing and opt for a good, old fashioned formula novel with a solid but predictable ending. That brings you to the question which is maybe the most vital: for whom are you writing and why? Is any kind of art creation done in favor of a potential audience or should it be done solely for the purposes of the artist himself, without any consideration to whether anyone will appreciate it or not? I think the answer is that it’s impossible for the serious artist to ignore the commercial value of art. An artist, who wants to make his living by his art, has to consider the potential buyer when he makes his art, but try at the same time to be true to his convictions. This kind of compromising might be seen as an evil by many, but is most likely the secret behind the successful artist.