You can feel the rage almost boiling over you, that unmistakable surge of betrayal, when you finally find a good book only for it to end on a cliffhanger so abrupt, so obsolete, you want to chuck it across the room — forget you ever picked it up.
You grumble about it for weeks, thinking of all the time wasted which could’ve been spent reading something better.
Though, was the cliffhanger really that bad as you had originally made it out to be? Or was it simply doing exactly what it was meant to?
Why We Fear the Bad Ending
You dive into a book expecting the same sense of closure, the familiar expectations, yet what you don’t expect is the ending striking off the familiar narrative, replacing it with something truly ambiguous.
A certain vision holds you in place as you flip through the script — the lovers reuniting, the villain facing defeat, and finally the hero gaining triumph. Suddenly, the world slows spinning
— tilting on its axis into an alternate reality one you truly never had in mind; the world doesn’t heal, the villain kills off the hero, and the estranged lovers never really make it through their troubled lives.
What makes these “tragic, abrupt and ambiguous conclusions” feel like cheating?
Well, for once, the audience craves safety in fiction — the inexplicable idea that everything always goes according to plan, giving them a safety net to fall back onto. They expect these stories to pick up the shattered shards of despair, piecing them together with the reverence of ignorance, until one day that net snaps and off you go tumbling into another tragic cut off.
We hate them, yet we can’t really forget them.
These tragic, melodramatic endings hold far more significance than any neatly packaged one. Bad endings, for instance, shouldn’t be categorised as “narrative failures” but hold deeper psychological and artistic values which are relatively more honest, meaningful and necessary than monotonous happy endings.
The Myth of Narrative Closure
In no book has it ever been served that fiction must reserve order and restore back tensions. The human subconscious desires stories that relate to narrative symmetry, showcasing a wide range of moral rewards and cliches. Similarly, Western media practices this ideology quite perfectly, placing the building blocks of cultural conditioning of happy endings, giving rise to capitalist media, which cements as well as publishes comforting endings that sell. Even schools educate us on how fairy tales and films are the epitome of closure, serving us crumbs of emotional relief on a platter to satiate our hunger.
Humans are relatively simple creatures. They see a pattern, they grow accustomed to it, and then they inhabit it — anything slightly different from it feels offsetting. In this case, these stories that “make sense” are the only ones that give us the reins in controlling and harnessing our illusions of perfection.
Which brings us to our argument of whether escapism vs reality could ever really be opponents? The answer to this question would be that our escapism-seeking subconscious only lets us absorb the comfort it provides, leaving out the bitter, undeniable truth of our reality, only delivered through sharp cliffhangers and actual morally grey endings.
The only other synonym for these so-called perfect endings would be “predictable.” This certain badge has been stamped for so long that it has flattened character complexities into mediocre tropes that create emotional dishonesty. Giving us false hope of a world that hasn’t existed in a thousand years. Leading to a genre of fiction I’d like to call the “over-sanitised version of fiction.”
The Artistic Purpose Of A Bad Ending
If we glance at the lives we’ve lived so far, it’ll be no surprise that we’ve all lived through tragedies that have shaped who we are, or who we became — making us realise life rarely ties itself up neatly, instead opting for grand gestures of heartbreak, loss and failure, bunching them up as the core or foundation of basic human experiences.
If we delve deeper into this spectrum, we’d come across several subcomponents of “bad” endings.
- i) The Tragic Ending:
If you’ve read “The Fault In Our Stars” or watched either “Atonement,” you would probably notice how the woeful ending has a purpose — to make us remember that our lives move with a stopwatch, one that could be paused at any breath, they help us bring forward recognition for real-life stakes through the slow blinking lights of cinematography. Tragedy may be heart-wrenching; on the contrary, it forces growth, reflection and moral ambiguity.
- ii) The Ambiguous Ending
The screws start turning every knob of your brain gets twisted once the screen reads “the end,” but you really can’t take your eyes off it for more than a second — “I know what he should do next” or “god this could easily worsen” play in your head like broken records — a tunnel left open for it’s passengers to wander through. The film has ended with its tale, yet it continues breathing in your mind.
Your subconscious flickers with uncertain possibilities and solutions, yet the film gives no hint, no closure, no proper ending.
Thick Inception, The Giver, and The Road are all examples of abrupt endings that have left tens to thousands of watchers restless, itching to know what would have happened if a certain possibility was taken up or whether a certain door had been closed.
This “uncertainty” reflects human experiences of never knowing what turn might lead to where.
iii) The Unfair Ending
Truly infuriating, absolutely maddening tales of corruption, loss, inequality, social critiques think of every injustice ever made real, critiquing to emotional realism, where the main idea of life rarely distributing justice evenly comes into play.
This most probably consists of different genres, including dystopian films, historical fiction and war narratives.
The Psychological Impact Of These Endings
If you compare a predictably perfect ending with a nerve-wracking, unforeseeable ending, the latter would always take the lead. Why?
Because incalculable unresolved narratives remain with us for far longer than more fulfilled ones. This is known as the “Zeigarnik Effect”,
The Zeigarnik effect is the psychological tendency to remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. The effect can be leveraged by starting tasks to ensure completion, using cliffhangers in storytelling, or simply finishing tasks to reduce mental clutter.
Thus, the brain remembers unfinished stories more vividly than fulfilled ones.
In practicality, the story becomes a dialogue rather than a product. When an open ending is placed, we humans can’t help but join the puzzle pieces to form an image of our own, catering to our perceptions — filling the void with our own fears and imagined outcomes.
Therefore, accepting that not all stories end well creates maturity. The literature we read becomes our rehearsals for emotional grief, uncertainty and everything that could ever go wrong. We read about it, register it, and try to work out our own solutions, catering to that problem, developing cognitive thinking.
Once again, happy endings oversimplify human emotions to already-scripted reactions linked to different scenarios. Real people fail, break down, throw tantrums, lose things they almost never get back, so “bad” endings don’t misdirect the narrative; they place it exactly where it’s always meant to be — the untidiness of reality, challenging readers to face rather than fear.
In Praise Of The Bad Endings
If an ending has ever provoked anger, betrayal, grief, confusion or re-reading to understand what in the world actually happened, then understand that the book has lived up to its fate — the text has done exactly what art’s supposed to do; evoke something real.
Finishing off, I’d still stress upon the fact that these “bad” endings are more often than not the only true reminders of what life has in store for us.
A story that unsettles you stays with you far longer than one that tucks you in.