Resolve the Governing Movement

Practice. Write two sentences, taking fifteen minutes. The first: “This ending completes ___.” Fill the blank with a movement, a question or pressure, not an event. The second: “It deliberately leaves alive ___.” Name something a reader could still wonder about, and ask whether that question belongs to the book’s movement or is a dropped one. Then give the ending, without your sentences, to one trusted reader and ask what they feel is still unresolved. If what they name is what you wrote in the first blank, the ending has not completed it, and it needs revision.

In the last scene of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), the narrator has locked the door of the rented nursery where her physician husband, John, has confined her for her health, and thrown the key into the front path. She has been forbidden to “work,” and told that what she feels is a draught. Now John pounds on the door and calls for an axe. She tells him, “in the gentlest voice,” where the key is, and he fetches it and comes in to find her creeping along the wall. “I’ve got out at last,” she tells him, and “you can’t put me back!” He faints across her path, “so that I had to creep over him every time!”

The story does not say whether John recovers, what the household will do, or what becomes of her, and readers rarely feel cheated by that. All through it others have decided what is wrong with her and what she may say, and she has answered only in a hidden journal. At the end she answers to his face, and he is something she steps over. Her perception, pressing against the authority that denied it, finally breaks through, and that pressure was what the story was about. A reader probably follows a work’s governing movement, the question, desire, or pressure that makes it cohere, rather than the full inventory of its questions, and checks the ending against that.

Some works owe a fuller answer. A traditional mystery is expected to say who, and a courtship comedy usually closes on the match because that is what it asked, so what the work promised sets the test (Practice 48). Serial, ongoing, or unfinished work may end on a pause rather than a conclusion, as long as the pause is chosen.