It’s occurred to me lately that our biggest problem with life is not the amount of suffering in it, but the fact that suffering doesn’t come in the right place.
Imagine a story in which the protagonist experiences trouble and pain all the way through. Finally, at the very end, he finds happiness and peace. That is, by common consent, a happy story. But a story in which he has happiness at the beginning, but then has trouble and pain all the way to the end, would be a sad story. So would a story where he is sad at the beginning, happy in the middle, but sad again at the end. Even if the sadness and happiness are in the same proportions as in the happy story. I guess it is because we tend to think of the end as the resting place, the place where life will settle down when the story is over.
If the trouble with life is not the existence of suffering, but the fact that suffering is all mixed up with the other stuff, then this is something that the traditional fairy-tale type story corrects for us. (So does traditional religion, where the good guys end up in heaven, and the bad guys get their due).
Literary short fiction, aware of the over-neatness of the ‘happy ending’, tends these days to end on an ambiguous or unresolved note. The wooden shutter bangs in the wind. Life doesn’t reach a resolution. It just goes on…
But since a story does actually have to stop, this final unresolved note does not actually sound quite like life just going on. It has a particular wistful, slightly plaintive ring of its own, which in its way is as artificial as a fairy tale happy ending, and can get a bit tedious. Life isn’t always wistful, and wistfulness certainly isn’t its natural resting place. Sometimes, for instance, we can feel completely at peace, even to the point of being entirely reconciled to the fact that the feeling of peace won’t go on forever.
Maybe to reflect the full diversity of available ending moments, it would be good to try and get away a bit from that plaintive, wistful and unresolved note, and try and end on as many different notes as possible, including cheerful ones.
