History NoEnding / Literature

* The fairy tale ''Ye Three Clever Kings'' has all the three kings abdicating their thrones after screwing up their job at ruling badly and leave the kingdom to become commoners. The Prime Minister and Chancellor panic because they now don't have any rulers, and try to convince one of the cousins to go back to being King. All three refuse, and the Prime Minister and Chancellor decide to try and find a new king elsewhere, and the story ends without the issue of the kingdom's lack of leadership ever getting resolved.

* The Franchise/StarTrek novel ''Literature/{{IQ}}'' is written by John de Lancie and Peter David, from Q's first-person point of view as he, Picard and Data try to save his family, Lady Q and q, and stop the universe from ending. They progress through several bizarre realms and realize that each is a representation of the universe itself going through the [[FiveStagesOfGrief Kubler-Ross stages of grief.]] In the end, they accomplish basically nothing and stare down the actual vortex sucking the universe, literally, down the drain. Q, at this point, desperate for options and knowing that absolutely none exist, [[spoiler: manifests a literal message-in-a-bottle in his hands, containing a copy of the book, declares that he is Loki himself and that the universe isn't ''allowed'' to end until he says so before throwing the bottle in.]] The book cuts off mid-sentence, and the following pages are absolutely blank [[spoiler: until, finally, the word "heh" starts appearing in the middle of each page. Normal text soon resumes; the bottle washes up on a beach where a young woman, shown in the novel's beginning to be the being responsible for the end, remembers briefly meeting Q by chance while reading it. The fact that Q, of all people, has learned even before the end of the universe to value life and living, is enough to convince her that the universe should continue, and she undoes the end.]]

* ''Literature/UnfinishedTalesOfNumenorAndMiddleEarth'' has the issue right there in the title; all the stories involved are in some stage of incompleteness. Consequently, several of them simply stop in the middle of a scene. ''The Coming of Tuor to Gondolin'' in particular seems to have been an attempt to rewrite ''Literature/TheFallOfGondolin'' that only got up to the part where Tuor, the hero, reaches the titular city.

* Creator/{{CLAMP}}'s ''Literature/{{Yumegari}}'' ends up with [[spoiler: Tatsumi falling victim to her DreamWeaver job, and her partner Kyousuke deciding to go save her from it.]]

* Creator/BretEastonEllis
** The novel ''Literature/AmericanPsycho'' ends with the words "This is not an exit" (on a sign that the protagonist reads).
** ''Literature/TheRulesOfAttraction'' ends as it began - in ''mid-sente''[[note]]Although both the first and final two words are the same—"and she"—it does not seem as if they are meant to be the same sentence, implying the story is cyclical only in the metaphorical sense.[[/note]]

%%* Also from Pynchon, ''Literature/GravitysRainbow''. "Now everybody—"

%%* Three novels by Creator/FranzKafka (''The Castle'', ''The Trial'' and ''America'') end abruptly.
* Creator/StephenKing:
** The novella ''Literature/TheMist'' "ends" on a very ambiguous note, with the surviving protagonists driving off to... Hartford. The King-approved movie version has a very definitive, very CruelTwistEnding. Watch at your own risk.[[note]]"King-approved" as in 'I enjoyed it, and wish I had thought of it myself'.[[/note]]
** King's also used this kind of ending in several of his works, but the ones that pop to mind immediately are "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" from ''Literature/DifferentSeasons'' (which [[Film/TheShawshankRedemption the movie]] gave a definite ending to) and ''Literature/PetSematary''.
** ''Literature/{{Cell}}'' also lacks any definite resolution, ending with [[spoiler:Clay dialing 911 on the cell phone he has, then holding it up to his semi-phoner son's ear]].
** This was a very common complaint about the [[Literature/TheWasteLands third book]] in ''Franchise/TheDarkTower''. It ended just as the riddle contest was ''beginning'', and fans had to wait a very long time to see it resumed.

* ''Literature/FinnegansWake'' by James Joyce deconstructs all aspects of novel and language, and also lacks an ending. The book opens mid-sentence and ends by beginning that first sentence: "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. ......... A way a lone a last a loved a long the"
* Paul Auster's ''City of Glass'' also ends abruptly, because [[spoiler:the narrative is a reconstruction of events based on Daniel Quinn's notebook, and ends when he runs out of room to write. A short epilogue states that Quinn was never found, and lays a lot of the blame on Auster]]. It's [[MindScrew that kind of book]].

* Pretty much anything written by Creator/NealStephenson is liable to end with the suddenness of a deliverator ploughing into a brick wall. ''Literature/SnowCrash'' and ''Literature/TheBaroqueCycle'' both manage to pull this off well, ending in an emotionally satisfying way while still leaving [[GainaxEnding many plot points unresolved]]. Done not so well in ''Literature/TheDiamondAge'', which could probably have used another hundred pages or so to treat more fully with all of the characters. ''Literature/{{Cryptonomicon}}'' does have a suitably epic ending, it's just that by that point, the POV character has lost interest, resulting in a highly condensed treatment of the book's GrandFinale, boiling a month's worth of events into five pages of text.
** Taken to the other extreme in ''Literature/{{REAMDE}}'' (Stephenson's caps), where the culminating [[WesternAnimation/WackyRaces chase]] after the {{big bad}} goes on for 300 pages. The thing is though, by the time this happens, the initial premise that gives the book its name ([[spoiler:an ingenious scam using an MMORPG video game as its vehicle]]) has been abandoned by the author and we never get know how it ends. A bit of a twist on ArtifactTitle.
* The Franchise/StarTrek novel ''Literature/{{IQ}}'' is written by John de Lancie and Peter David, from Q's first-person point of view as he, Picard and Data try to save his family, Lady Q and q, and stop the universe from ending. They progress through several bizarre realms and realize that each is a representation of the universe itself going through the [[FiveStagesOfGrief Kubler-Ross stages of grief.]] In the end, they accomplish basically nothing and stare down the actual vortex sucking the universe, literally, down the drain. Q, at this point, desperate for options and knowing that absolutely none exist, [[spoiler: manifests a literal message-in-a-bottle in his hands, containing a copy of the book, declares that he is Loki himself and that the universe isn't ''allowed'' to end until he says so before throwing the bottle in.]] The book cuts off mid-sentence, and the following pages are absolutely blank [[spoiler: until, finally, the word "heh" starts appearing in the middle of each page. Normal text soon resumes; the bottle washes up on a beach where a young woman, shown in the novel's beginning to be the being responsible for the end, remembers briefly meeting Q by chance while reading it. The fact that Q, of all people, has learned even before the end of the universe to value life and living, is enough to convince her that the universe should continue, and she undoes the end.]]

* The ending of Creator/RobinHobb's ''Literature/RealmOfTheElderlings'' trilogy resolves very few, if any, of the many outstanding plot threads. They're tied up a little better in the following ''Tawny Man'' trilogy.
* ''Literature/TheRedPony'' seems to come to an abrupt stop, at least to tenth grade English students. Jody feels sorry for his grandfather and offers to make him some lemonade.

* Creator/PiersAnthony's ''Mute'' was supposed to be the beginning of a series. Instead, it ends with a Grand Canyon sized cliffhanger, and the author [[WordOfGod has said]] that he will not be revisiting that [[TheVerse universe]].
* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy1'' didn't really end as such, it just ground to an abrupt halt in the middle of the action. Fortunately, Adams got much better at writing endings for the later books. The story goes that when writing that book Adams, who had a [[ScheduleSlip legendary ability to miss deadlines]], was sufficiently late that the publisher just told him "look, finish up the page you're on and we'll send someone to get it in an hour."
** In-universe, Arthur reads a Bartledanian novel wherein the main character dies of thirst in the penultimate chapter because of a plumbing issue briefly mentioned in chapter two. The rest of the book talks about road mending until it ends at precisely one hundred thousand words, which is how long novels are on Bartledan.

* Rachel Preston's ''Tent Of Blue.'' While also it [[LeftHanging leaves you hanging]], many questions that are aroused in the reader's mind towards the end are never answered at the end. How did Yvonne get her son, Anton, out of the mental asylum without Harold's consent? Never mentioned. Not once.
* C. S. Forester's last ''Literature/HoratioHornblower'' novel was left without ending, as the author DiedDuringProduction.
* ''Literature/TheCanterburyTales'' has no ending, and critics have argued about whether or not it is actually unfinished, or if it was due to [[DiedDuringProduction the author's death]].
* Mark Twain's ''Literature/TheAdventuresOfTomSawyer'' ends with a note saying that when you're writing about adults, you can end it with a HappilyEverAfter or something like that, but when you're writing about kids, you just need to find a good stopping place. It didn't stop him from writing sequels, however, including ''Literature/AdventuresOfHuckleberryFinn''.
* ''Literature/PicnicAtHangingRock'' ended without a resolution[[note]] - although one possible interpretation of the differing descriptions of the terrain before and after the disappearance is that a rock fall occurred, completely burying the missing ones. It went unnoticed by the people in the area when it happened, and none of the searchers had the sufficient knowledge of the area to be able to recognise the recent rock fall after the fact[[/note]]. It later received one, in the form of the previously unpublished final chapter, which sees the missing women ending up in MindScrew land (time warp, [[AfterlifeAntechamber Limbo]], Dreamtime, you guess), and basically replaces a No Ending with a GainaxEnding.
* Creator/EdgarAllanPoe's novel ''Literature/TheNarrativeOfArthurGordonPymOfNantucket'' ends in the middle of things, allegedly because Pym died before he could recount the end of his tale.
* Several unfinished stories of Creator/HPLovecraft's, such as "Azathoth", have been mass published.
* One of the ''Literature/ScaryStoriesToTellInTheDark'' collections features the urban legend of the medical students who pull the prank on one of their peers by cutting a hand from a cadaver and tying it to the pull string of the light in her room. The ending was apparently deemed inappropriate for children, so the story ends with the prankster returning and discovering the girl sitting on the floor of her closet and muttering to herself, apparently driven mad. The narration: "[[DeadlyPrank The joke had worked. But no one was laughing.]]" End of text. For the curious, the usual ending to this story is that [[spoiler:the students break into her room and discover she has been driven mad and started to ''eat'' the arm.]]
* ''Literature/StarshipTroopers'' ends with Rico successfully completing his second crack at Officer Candidate School and taking command of the Roughnecks. What happens from there, including the outcome of the war, isn't shown, mostly due to it being more of a ComingOfAge story if anything.
* ''Literature/SpecialTopicsInCalamityPhysics'' plays with this: the book ends with a "multiple choice exam", the answers to which suggest a few ways to tie up the loose ends.
* In ''The Remembering'', Steve Cash's third book of The Meq trilogy, most of the characters "cross over" and finally start to age after centuries of immortality in childlike bodies. The previously immortal characters grow up and start having kids. However, questions that remained unanswered throughout the entire series are never explained or resolved, such as the mystery of what the Meq are, where they came from, why they were semi-immortal and possessed strange powers, what their purpose is on Earth in relation to humans, etc. The third book keeps hinting at the resolution of all these questions right up to the end, but they are never answered and by then the characters don't even seem too curious anymore about their origins.
* The poem Humpty Dumpty recites to Alice in ''Literature/ThroughTheLookingGlass'' ends abruptly in mid-sentence.
* Creator/TheBrothersGrimm story "The Golden Key," which is basically one long paragraph, tells a story of a boy who discovers a key in the snow, then discovers a locked wooden box. The boy imagines what wondrous things might be inside the box. He searches the box for a keyhole, finally finds it, and inserts the key... but the reader will have to wait for him to turn the key before finding out what's in the box. End. What's more, it's generally put at the very end of the brothers' collection; many scholars think that this was a purposeful choice, indicating that folklore itself always leaves something more to discover.
* One of Creator/OrsonScottCard's earliest novels, ''Literature/HartsHope'', is entirely [[EpistolaryNovel epistolary]], explaining the adventures of main character Orem and his efforts to defeat the BigBad. However, by doing so, Orem temporarily usurped the rightful king, and the novel is ''to'' that king from his wife, begging him (the king) not to execute Orem for treason. The final lines are her asking him what he decided.
* Creator/{{David Lodge|Writer}}'s novel ''Literature/ChangingPlaces'' has a deeply lamp-shaded No Ending in which the characters (two of whom are professors of literature so it makes sense) discuss the idea of endings and point out that a film can suddenly end with no warning while a book can't, since the reader can see how many pages remain.

* Creator/JorgeLuisBorges short story '' "Averroes' Search" '' ends with all the characters and his surroundings suddenly disappearing, except maybe the Guadalquivir River. For very {{Postmodern}} reasons.
* Creator/CliveBarker's ''Literature/{{Weaveworld}}'' begins with an assertion that it has no ending, but once it finally gets there, the conclusion is actually a case of AndTheAdventureContinues. The Weaveworld itself is a [[AdventureFriendlyWorld wonderland for grownups,]] after all.
* Nadine Gordimer's works often end this way. ''The Late Bourgeois World'' has the main character still considering her dilemma. ''July's People'', in which the apartheid government collapses amid violence, switches from past tense to present for the short last chapter, in which the main female protagonist is running towards a helicopter that contains either "saviors or murderers".
* ''Literature/TheGrapesOfWrath'' doesn't end so much as run out of pages, with Rose of Sharon breastfeeding a sick man, some of the Joads gone from the group or dead, and the rest just weathering the storm.
* Ouida Sebestyen's The Girl in the Box is a story of a girl who is abducted and left in a dark cellar, with only a typewriter to entertain her, and regular rations of stale food and water to keep her alive. The book ends with the girl still in the box, and her ultimate fate is never revealed.
* Occurs in-universe ''Literature/TheFaultInOurStars''. The main characters’ favorite book ends mid-sentence, leaving several plot lines unresolved, and one subplot of the novel deals with the characters trying to find out from the author what happened to the characters.
* The first and currently only Creator/{{CLAMP}}'s ''Literature/{{Yumegari}}'' ends up with [[spoiler: Tatsumi falling victim to her DreamWeaver job, and her partner Kyousuke deciding to go save her from it.]]
* Mary Brown's ''Master of Many Treasures'' ends with the heroine being very badly injured. A DistantEpilogue describes two stories told about the aftermath, one where she dies and one where she recovers and lives a long life with the hero. A sequel set many years later, ''Dragonne's Eg'', deliberately does not clarify the outcome.
* ''Literature/ANecklaceOfFallenStars'': The last tale Kaela tells, "A Necklace of Fallen Stars", abruptly ends with Vyria waiting for Amden's answer to her confession of love.
* Creator/SamuelRDelany:
** ''Literature/{{Dhalgren}}'' ends in the middle of a sentence. It ''starts'' in the middle of a sentence as well, and grafting the two together Ouroboros-fashion results in a sentence that makes sense grammatically. How much sense it makes in any other way is considerably more ambiguous.
** ''Literature/{{Nova}}'', which is loosely based on the search for the Holy Grail, tells us how many writers have died before finishing tales of the Grail, and then deliberately omits the very last word of the book.
* Robert Musil's epic novel ''The Man Without Qualities.'' Musil couldn't figure out how to conclude the final volume.
* Alex Scarrow's ''Literature/{{Timeriders}}'' series ended with half the main characters in the middle of trying to save the human race, and other half deciding whether to join them. The author encourages the reader to come up with their own ending.
* ''Literature/{{Nutshell}}'' ends with the woman giving birth to her unborn child while she and her lover are in the middle of packing their bags to flee from the police.
* ''Literature/NorthToBenjamin'' ends with Edgar, Caroline, and Victoria looking out over the Yukon River after laying Benjamin's body to rest in the Paddle Wheel Cemetery.
* ''Literature/TheNeverendingStory'' purposefully leaves almost all subplots — such as what happened to the four messengers, Cairon's fate after meeting Atreyu, the adventures of Hero Hyrneck, what became of Ghemmal and of Sikanda — hanging. Hence the title. However, Bastian's main plot is resolved.
* Lampshaded to make a point in ''Literature/VergeStories''' "The Pull". The story stops before we learn the fate of the characters because, ultimately, their survival should not be reassuring when countless others like them are still in peril.
-->This story has no ending.\\
''We'' put children into the ocean.
* ''[[Literature/MissSmillasFeelingForSnow Smilla's Sense of Snow/Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow]]'' ends with the eponymous narrator chasing the villainous Tørk Hviid across the Greenlandic snow, hoping to head him off and initiate a FinalBattle. We never get to see it, though, or learn its outcome; we're also left hanging on the future of the romantic subplot and the true nature of the MacGuffin. As Smilla ends the book by pointing out, life seldom observes neat story lines.
* ''Literature/WarAndPeace'' ends right as political unrest is beginning to swell in 1820, and one of the deceased main characters' sons has [[PsychicDreamsForEveryone an ominous dream]] about taking part in a revolution. It's implied that this revolution divides all the main characters into two camps who will have to fight each other.
* ''Literature/UnfinishedTalesOfNumenorAndMiddleEarth'' has the issue right there in the title; all the stories involved are in some stage of incompleteness. Consequently, several of them simply stop in the middle of a scene. ''The Coming of Tuor to Gondolin'' in particular seems to have been an attempt to rewrite ''Literature/TheFallOfGondolin'' that only got up to the part where Tuor, the hero, reaches the titular city.

* The ''Literature/TheThirteenthWarrior'' ends ibn Fadlan's account with "Now it happened that" and suddenly cuts off. Footnotes explain that the rest of the account was never found. Since the main narrative (''Literature/{{Beowulf}}'' in the 10th century) had already concluded at that point, not many readers complained.

* ''Literature/AngelaNicely'': “Blooming Gardens!” ends with Angela being glared at for pushing Mrs. Shrub the judge into the pond (mistaking her for Mrs. Nicely’s rival Mrs. Nettles), but we never find out whether Mrs. Nicely wins or loses the competition, or what happens to Angela.

* The Creator/MichaelCrichton novel ''Literature/EatersOfTheDead'' ends ibn Fadlan's account with "Now it happened that" and suddenly cuts off. Footnotes explain that the rest of the account was never found. Since the main narrative (''Literature/{{Beowulf}}'' in the 10th century) had already concluded at that point, not many readers complained.
* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'' didn't really end as such, it just ground to an abrupt halt in the middle of the action. Fortunately, Adams got much better at writing endings for the later books. The story goes that when writing that book Adams, who had a [[ScheduleSlip legendary ability to miss deadlines]], was sufficiently late that the publisher just told him "look, finish up the page you're on and we'll send someone to get it in an hour."

* ''Literature/WarAndPeace'' ends right as political unrest is beginning to swell in 1820, and one of the deceased main characters' sons has [[PsychicDreamsForEveryone an ominous dream]] about taking part in a revolution. It's implied that this revolution divides all the main characters into two camps who will have to fight each other.