Schappell and Hempel Response

             In her essay “Endings,” Elissa Schappell describes thirteen common ways of ending stories, both favorable and unfavorable. Schappell makes the point that endings in life, like the ends of relationships, are much more memorable than the relationships’ beginnings. This may be true of real life, but when I thought about it, I could remember far more literary beginnings, or first lines than endings, or last lines. The only ending I remember specifically being struck by is the ending to one of my favorite novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Marquez. I remember the ending because it perfectly tied together the prophecy made by Melquiades at the beginning of the novel regarding the degradation of the Buendia family and the town of Macondo. The reader is left with one poignant image of a baby, the one hope for the family’s lineage, being carried away and eaten by fire ants, thus bringing the story full circle. Schappell describes several of the undesirable types of endings, like the “Doogie Howser” ending, wherein the narrator bluntly tells the reader the message meant to be gleaned from the story, or the “big bang” ending, which involves sudden dramatic concluding events. To guard against these types of undesirable endings, I often gravitate towards open or symbolic endings. In open endings, the story merely ends without reaching a point of distinct resolution, leaving the reader to interpret the change that has occurred. However, I fall into the temptation of leaving the ending too open, which can feel lazy instead of intentional. I also gravitate to symbolic endings, which can work, but often don’t, as in my first story, where in my haste to finish a first draft I invoked the symbolic image of rebirth in flowery language, without fully considering the meaning of the image in relation to the rest of the narrative. The image thus becomes like the “low-hanging fruit” Schappell describes. 

         In Amy Hempel’s story “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried,” Hempel uses a similar structure to Marquez, introducing an element in the beginning of the story that is given greater emotional weight by the time it is repeated at the closing. Hempel’s ending fulfills Scheppell’s advice that, through an ending, “the world gets larger, not smaller.” Through the anecdote of the grieving chimp, Hempel’s narrator comes to terms with her own grief. Just as the profound emotion of grief transcends species, so it transcends narrative and fills the reader with a sense of aching loss as well.