Endings
Question 3 ‘The end is every tale’s strength’ – Chaucer. How effective are the conclusions of any two of the set novels? The last few lines of a novel are, generally speaking, those which will resonate most in a reader’s mind in the days, months and years after first reading. Through necessity, as the final curtain falls the author must leave a lasting impression – who would easily forget, for example, Hamlet’s climactic and blood-soaked denouement, and the numerous questions it left for the reader? The end of a tale also gives the author one last chance to weave all narrative threads together, forming a cohesive tapestry of the entire text. Chaucer’s himself, in his own collection of assorted fabliaux, often presents the moral of the tales neatly for the reader at their conclusions. The end of a novel is often the most affecting point, packing more emotional punch per paragraph than much of the story’s beginning – indeed, the torrent of grim events that ended King Lear was such that G.Wilson Knight found he could not bring himself to read it twice, describing it as ‘irredeemably bleak’. The strength a good ending can give a novel is granted extra fortitude by Henry James in The Turn of the Screw, in which many interpretations are possible (therein lying the crux of the entire text), and in Jane Austen’s Emma. While both novels handle their endings in very different ways, the effects are largely the same. The closing chapters of James' The Turn of the Screw are pivotal to one's understanding of the text. The death of Miles can be subject to numerous interpretations – if one is to take the possibility that the children are possessed as real, then it can be assumed Miles’ death is a direct result of Quint’s exorcism. However, in Mile’s last words lies another, deeper meaning; 'Peter Quint, you devil!' His face gave again, round the room, its convulsed supplication. 'Where?'' At first reading it seems Miles is calling Quint a ‘devil’ – that the mere mention of this demonic figure sends the young boy into a panic, one so severe as to shock him to death. It is certainly a rather vitriolic reaction from the usually chillingly placid Miles. However, as with most things in the book, the line is open to multiple interpretations – is the boy’s invective aimed at the Governess, and not, as she believes, at the apparition of Quint. If so, it is at once an uprooting of one potential understanding of the text, and a powerful confirmation of another. If Quint does not appear here, in the finale of the novella, was he ever there at all? And if not, it follows that every other supernatural event the Governess believes she witnessed were too figments, and there are many moments in the novel to give credence to this theory.