No Endings in Literature.
By Author:
- Pretty much anything written by Neal Stephenson is liable to end with the suddenness of a deliverator ploughing into a brick wall. Snow Crash and The Baroque Cycle both manage to pull this off well, ending in an emotionally satisfying way while still leaving many plot points unresolved. Done not so well in The Diamond Age, which could probably have used another hundred pages or so to treat more fully with all of the characters. 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 Grand Finale, boiling a month's worth of events into five pages of text.
- Taken to the other extreme in REAMDE (Stephenson's caps), where the culminating 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 (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 Artifact Title.
By Title:
- 2666: All of the chapters ended abruptly with no resolution.
- Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ends with a note saying that when you're writing about adults, you can end it with a Happily Ever After 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 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
- The novel American Psycho ends with the words "This is not an exit" (on a sign that the protagonist reads).
- Angela Nicely: "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.
- In Animorphs, Rachel takes the secret of David's fate — whether she killed him or returned him to the island — at book 48's end to her grave.
- Also, the entire series ends on a cliffhanger, albeit a kind of tacked-on one.
- Additionally, in another book, Jake wakes up as an adult in a Yeerk-controlled future. In the end, it turns out to be All Just a Dream some unknown beings (presumably aliens) put him through in order to study humans. However, it's never revealed what choice he made at the end of the dream (to either save Cassie or save the world; all we know is that the aliens remark on it being an "interesting choice"), and it's also never explained who or what the aliens were.
- Jorge Luis Borges short story "Averroes' Search" ends with all the characters and his surroundings suddenly disappearing, except maybe the Guadalquivir River. For very Postmodern reasons.
- Daphne du Maurier's short story "The Birds", the basis for the Hitchcock film, ends abruptly with no suggestion as to how the plot might proceed from there, as the protagonist throws the pack of cigarettes he's just finished into the fireplace and watches it burn.
- In The Blue Lagoon, Arthur Lestrange asks about the fate of his son and niece, “Are they dead?” Captain Stannistreet answers him that “they are asleep.”
- Dr. Seuss's The Butter Battle Book: A bitter arms race culminates with the leaders of the butter-side-up and butter-side-down armies both about to employ a weapon of mass destruction, while a child who's been following the conflict watches the tense standoff. It was nearly the victim of Executive Meddling, as Geisel was pressured to change the ending to a happy one by his publishers. It is appropriate to the story as a parable about the Cold War, since it, quite thankfully, ended without a definitive resolution.
- The Canterbury Tales has no ending, and critics have argued about whether or not it is actually unfinished, or if it was due to the author's death.
- Cell lacks any definite resolution, ending with Clay dialing 911 on the cell phone he has, then holding it up to his semi-phoner son's ear.
- The Change Room: The book ends right after both Eliza and Andrew learn Shar was once a sex worker as she's about to tell both of them about it. It's left unknown as to how either of them will react, along with whether Eliza will stay with Andrew, Shar or both.
- David Lodge's novel Changing Places 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.
- Paul Auster's City of Glass also ends abruptly, because 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 that kind of book.
- The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon ends just as Oedipa makes any real headway in solving the mystery.
- This was a very common complaint about the third book in The Dark Tower. It ended just as the riddle contest was beginning, and fans had to wait a very long time to see it resumed.
- 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.
- Eaters of the Dead 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 (Beowulf in the 10th century) had already concluded at that point, not many readers complained.
- Everworld also ends on a cliffhanger — Loki has freed Odin from his trap and they, combined with Merlin and the Old Worlders, freed Thor and Baldur from Hel. They have plans to unite all the gods against Ka Anor. Smash Cut to a news story about the five teens having disappeared.
- Occurs in-universe The Fault in Our Stars. 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.
- Finnegans Wake 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"
- 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.
- The Brothers Grimm 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.
- The Grapes of Wrath 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.
- The Handmaid's Tale ends with Offred fleeing Gilead with the help of La Résistance, but the reader never finds out whether or not she survives. The epilogue is set many years after Gilead has collapsed, with the main story revealed to be a record she left on audio tape. It notes that (in-universe) historians consider "the Handmaid's Tale" to be a valuable resource, but don't know much more about her than we do.
- One of Orson Scott Card's earliest novels, Hart's Hope, is entirely epistolary, explaining the adventures of main character Orem and his efforts to defeat the Big Bad. 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.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 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 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.
- C. S. Forester's last Horatio Hornblower novel was left without ending, as the author Died During Production.
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy ends with the main characters, menaced by a giant undersea monster, deciding to retire from the bridge of their submarine and discuss the literary symbolism of said sea creature. The story then switches perspective to an obscure character who has only been mentioned a handful of times in the entire series, who proceeds to die in an earthquake. The End.
- Infinite Jest: The novel goes on for over one thousand pages and practically all the main plot points are unresolved at the end. On the other hand, we see one of the main characters after the main events in the first chapter, so...
- 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".
- Frank Richard Stockton's short story "The Lady, or the Tiger?" is possibly the earliest use of this trope. Instead of revealing whether the princess has chosen to send her lover to another woman or to death by tiger, the narrator leaves it to the reader to decide. The contemporary audience was so playfully insistent on getting the official answer out of Stockton that they once tried to trick him into choosing between platters of food shaped like a lady and a tiger. (He politely refused.)
- He wrote a sequel, "The Discourager of Hesitancy," where a prince is married blindfolded and told to pick his new bride out of a line of forty women, two of whom give him subtle clues: one smiles, the other frowns. (A servant of the king is standing close by with a sword, just in case he chooses wrong.) At the end, the narrator of the story tells his guests that if they can tell him how he chose correctly, he will tell them whether the lady or the tiger came through the door. Cue groans and sighs of resignation from the reader.
- The Late Bourgeois World has the main character still considering her dilemma.
- Robert Musil's epic novel The Man Without Qualities. Musil couldn't figure out how to conclude the final volume.
- Mary Brown's Master of Many Treasures ends with the heroine being very badly injured. A Distant Epilogue 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.
- 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 Final Battle. 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.
- The novella The Mist "ends" on a very ambiguous note, with the surviving protagonists driving off to... Hartford. The King-approved movie version has a very definitive, very Cruel Twist Ending. Watch at your own risk.note
- Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation specifically follows the life of Rudeus Greyrat. As such his death is the ending of the story. Despite this the main plot of defeating Hitogami goes unresolved as the final battle will occur decades later.
- Piers Anthony's Mute was supposed to be the beginning of a series. Instead, it ends with a Grand Canyon sized cliffhanger, and the author has said that he will not be revisiting that universe.
- Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ends in the middle of things, allegedly because Pym died before he could recount the end of his tale.
- A Necklace of Fallen Stars: The last tale Kaela tells, "A Necklace of Fallen Stars", abruptly ends with Vyria waiting for Amden's answer to her confession of love.
- The Neverending Story 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.
- North To Benjamin ends with Edgar, Caroline, and Victoria looking out over the Yukon River after laying Benjamin's body to rest in the Paddle Wheel Cemetery.
- 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.
- 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.
- Oddly Enough:
- "In Our Own Hands" ends with Johnny contemplating his hand, still trying to decide how he's voting with five minutes to go before the vote to decide mankind's fate — will they choose to let the Lyrans take over Earth and fix everything, or not?
- "In the Frog King's Court" ends with Dennis, in his giant frog form, about to confront the man who's been dumping chemical waste in the swamp, without showing the actual confrontation and what resulted.
- In Our Wives Under the Sea, Leah comes back wrong from an undersea expedition and undergoes a strange transformation throughout the story. We never figure out what exactly it was that Leah found underwater, except that it was a massive creature who stared at her with an eye. Leah attempts to communicate with it, then surfaces, and what caused her to turn into her modified form is never explained.
- Marianne de Pierres' Parrish Plessis series ends suddenly and abruptly when the titular character commits suicide rather than succumb to The Corruption. Since Parrish is a first-person narrator, we don't find out the resolution to any of the plot threads that she doesn't. If she never sees a character again, then neither do we, no matter how important that character was.
- Picnic at Hanging Rock ended without a resolutionnote . It later received one, in the form of the previously unpublished final chapter, which sees the missing women ending up in Mind Screw land (time warp, Limbo, Dreamtime, you guess), and basically replaces a No Ending with a Gainax Ending.
- The Princess Bride ends this way (with explicit reference to "The Lady or the Tiger"), with William Goldman as "the editor" giving his own opinions on how the story ends, continuing to screw with the audience because he wrote the friggin' story himself.
- Many years later, he did an updated version which says what happened (basically, Westley's crew ambushes Humperdinck's men, the heroes manage to reach his ship and escape, and a "blood clogger" saves Inigo's life). But then he adds some future snippets, specifically after Westley and Buttercup's child is born. To make a long story short, a bitter rival of Westley's kidnaps the baby, Fezzik confronts him, and the rival tosses the hapless girl off a cliff. Fezzik leaps after her...aaaand, that's it. Not a word since.
- The ending of Robin Hobb's Realm of the Elderlings 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.
- The Red Pony 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.
- 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 Rules of Attraction ends as it began - in mid-sentenote
- One of the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark 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: "The joke had worked. But no one was laughing." End of text. For the curious, the usual ending to this story is that the students break into her room and discover she has been driven mad and started to eat the arm.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events. The final book is called The End, but it is anything but. While the plot is resolved at its absolute-most-basic, i.e. the fate of the Baudelaires and Count Olaf and who Beatrice was, the numerous questions and plot threads accumulated over the course of the series are pointedly dropped as part of an unconventional "you can never have all the answers" Aesop. The story also ends with the Baudelaires sailing away from the island with Kit Snicket's daughter. Understandably, many readers were frustrated.
- Special Topics In Calamity Physics 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.
- Starship Troopers 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 Coming of Age story if anything.
- The Star Trek novel I, Q 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 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, 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 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.
- Stuart Little ends with zero resolution; Stuart simply affirms his determination to find his friend, roll proverbial credits. Apparently author E.B. White was concerned about his health, and decided to end the book at the best place he could find rather than keep going with it and risk leaving it unfinished at an even less satisfying point. However, even after he recovered and lived another 40 years, he never went back to finish the book.
- One of the oldest examples ever is a thousand years old, Lady Murasaki's The Tale of Genji which doesn't so much end as quietly fade out, as the author Died During Production.
- Rachel Preston's Tent Of Blue: While also it 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.
- The fairy tale Ye Three Clever Kings has all the three kings abdicating their thrones after screwing up their ruling dutiesnote and leaving 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 poem Humpty Dumpty recites to Alice in Through the Looking Glass ends abruptly in mid-sentence.
- Alex Scarrow's 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.
- Tolkien's Legendarium:
- Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth 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 The Fall of Gondolin that only got up to the part where Tuor, the hero, reaches the titular city.
- The Fall of Númenor:
- "Aldarion and Erendis: The Mariner's Wife" abruptly stops after the titular couple's marriage breaks down, followed by some texts explaining how their daughter Ancalimë got mentally screwed up due to her parents' toxic relationship, and ending with a short paragraph regarding Erendis travelling to the haven of Rómenna in her old age, where she "perished in the water."
- The "The Lost Road" fragment stops right after Elendil reveals his son his plans and tells him he will unfortunately be obliged to choose between joining Elendil's rebellion or siding with Sauron.
- Robert Silverberg's Up the Line ends with the hero hiding from the Time Service in an obscure era where with any luck they'll never find him. He knows however that his respite is only temporary, since instead of killing him directly they can cause him to never have existed in the first place, and even as he speculates this, his narration — just as he predicted — is cut off short in mid-sentence.
- Lampshaded to make a point in Verge: Stories' "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. - War and Peace ends right as political unrest is beginning to swell in 1820, and one of the deceased main characters' sons has 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.
- Clive Barker's Weaveworld begins with an assertion that it has no ending, but once it finally gets there, the conclusion is actually a case of And the Adventure Continues. The Weaveworld itself is a wonderland for grownups, after all.
- Wizja Lokalna resolves neither of its conflicts and ends with the protagonist ends wondering whether it's been All Just a Dream and deciding it hasn't. We don't even learn how he got back home.
- Zadie Smith's White Teeth ends with the author proposing several endings that various demographics might find appealing, but without endorsing any of them. Why yes, it's postmodern.
- CLAMP's Yumegari ends up with Tatsumi falling victim to her Dream Weaver job, and her partner Kyousuke deciding to go save her from it.
