Read How to Write a Sentence Online
Authors: Stanley Fish
First sentences, as we have seen, are promissory notes. Whether they foreshadow plot, sketch in character, establish mood, or jump-start arguments, the road ahead of them stretches invitingly and all things are, at least for the moment, possible. Last sentences are more constrained in their possibilities. They can sum up, refuse to sum up, change the subject, leave you satisfied, leave you wanting more, put everything into perspective, or explode perspectives. They do have one advantage: they become the heirs of the interest that is generated by everything that precedes them; they don’t have to start the engine; all they have to do is shut it down. This means that they often come across as elegiac: the reader is leaving something he or she has grown fond of, and will therefore be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the author’s parting statement. That may be the explanation for the good reputation of some last sentences that aren’t really all that good, like the famous last sentence of Dickens’s
A Tale of Two Cities
(1859):
It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done before; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.
This one we could imitate forever: “It is a far, far better burger that I eat than I have ever eaten before; it is a far, far better digestive experience I go to than I have ever known.” “It is a far, far better house I buy than I have ever imagined; it is a far, far better zip code I go to than I could have hoped for.” The sentence is just too formulaic, mechanical, and stagey; were it not for the emotions built up in the course of the novel, no one would ever have taken note of it. (I have the same opinion of the novel’s even more famous first sentence.)
Some last sentences do deserve the fame they enjoy, not because they are stand-alone achievements, but because they rise to the last-sentence occasion and do the requisite summing up. A good example is the last line of the movie
Some Like It Hot
(1959)—“Well, nobody’s perfect.” It is spoken by Joe E. Brown, playing a millionaire who has been courting Jerry ( Jack Lemmon) in drag. Jerry has been trying to explain to Osgood (Brown’s character) why they can’t marry, but Osgood deflects and rebuts each reason. Finally, thinking that he has an argument Osgood cannot rebut, Jerry rips off his wig and declares, “I’m a man.” The reply, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” entirely undoes the game of giving reasons by upending the assumptions that were supposedly driving the plot—that men and women are different, that it matters, that anything matters. Of course those assumptions were always being put into question in the movie, with its cross-dressing, reversal of gender roles, and boundary-blurring wit. It is just that “Well, nobody’s perfect” reprises these (sometimes subterranean) themes and puts the “perfect” cap to them.
Other famous last lines do something of the same for the works they conclude. “After all, tomorrow is another day” is of course the last line of the movie
Gone With the Wind
(1939), and the last of the declarations by Scarlett O’Hara that the world will not defeat her. “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” the final line of Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
(1926), is just as famous for its rueful and succinct expression of the novel’s mixture of romanticism, cynicism, and flinty realism. (“Pretty” is the word that does most of the work; it suggests something attractive and something meretricious at the same time; it is at once an affirmative statement and a judgment on it.) “He loved Big Brother” is the celebrated last line of Orwell’s
1984
(1949); in just four words it announces the dark inevitability of totalitarianism’s triumph.
But these sentences will not serve my purpose here, because any assessment of their impact depends on a full knowledge of what has preceded them. Standing alone, “Nobody’s perfect” is a cliché; “Tomorrow is another day” is a banality; “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” an unremarkable question; and “He loved Big Brother” an apparent piece of sentimentality. What I’m after in this section are last sentences that yield their riches (or at least some of them) to an analysis that focuses on them in relative isolation. I say “relative” because “last sentence,” like “first sentence,” is both a formal and a content category. Last sentences are formal items because they can be picked out with no reference to anything that is being said; but it is only because of the things that have been said before they appear that last sentences are resonant. So in the parade of last sentences that follows, formal and thematic analysis will mix promiscuously. I shall be reading in full appreciative mode and looking for sentences that would make an impression even on those who did not know the works they bring to a close.
They needn’t be long or even very serious. In the last line of the movie
The Professionals
(1966), Ralph Bellamy’s character calls Lee Marvin’s character a bastard. Marvin replies:
In my case, an accident of birth, but you, sir, you’re a self-made man.
The sentence plays on the meanings of “bastard,” a person born out of wedlock and a person of bad character. “Self-made man” is usually a compliment, but here it is a sardonic and witty comment on a nominal gentleman’s ability to achieve a (negative) status he wasn’t born to. (The most insulting word in the sentence is “sir.”)
The last line of Henry James’s
The Wings of the Dove
(1902) is even shorter and decidedly serious. “We shall never be again as we were” records the realization by Kate Croy that she and Merton Densher have made for themselves a quite different future than the one they imagined they could build on Millie Theale’s fragility. But you don’t have to recall that to be taken by a sentence that, while short, unfolds in ever more devastating stages. “We shall” seems to predict a future, but that future is immediately taken away by “never,” a word that not only bars access to a better time, but, as the construction continues, negates being itself: “We shall never be.” And neither shall they ever have an “again”; time cannot flow backward and give them repeated being; they can only experience themselves as horribly different from what they were. The sentence would be an accomplishment even if we didn’t know the story it brings to an end.
Ditto for the last sentence of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818):
He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.
To be sure, it helps to know that “he” is the monster and that he has stepped onto an ice raft after having declaimed over the dead body of his creator. But even without that knowledge the sentence communicates the desolation and finality of his journey. There are two stages to it. Because “soon” precedes “borne away,” we have a sense of rapid movement before we know what kind of movement it is; and then when we find out it is already movement “away.” (Think how different it would be if the sentence read, “He was borne away by the waves soon.”) Since waves are themselves movement (that’s all they are), the swiftness of passage is even more heightened. “Soon” is carried over silently from the first part of the sentence and attaches itself to “lost,” at once literal and the final allusion in the novel to Milton’s great epic. So lost is he that his loss is described in two measures that alliterate, “darkness and distance,” words that themselves have double meanings: he is dark in that he cannot be seen, and he is dark in his interior; he is distant in the literal sense of being far away and in the metaphorical sense of being apart from all other beings.
In the last sentence of Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
(1926), the rhetorical effect is also carried by alliteration—a figure of speech often used to intensify emotions and assertions—but in this case the repeated consonant is
b
rather than
d
.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The narrator, Nick Carraway, has been recalling Jay Gatsby’s faith in a future that will bring him his dream: Daisy Buchanan and everything she stands for. We are all, Carraway muses, like Gatsby, running toward a promised land “that year by year recedes before us.” This last sentence mimes the treadmill we are on, mocking our efforts at acceleration with a series of
b
’s—“beat,” “boats,” “borne,” “back”—that keeps bringing us to the same place. We try to get ahead, but the current, both of life and the sentence, flows ceaselessly backward, carrying us again and again into the past, which is of course the sentence’s last word. It says, here we are again.
The Great Gatsby
is thought to have been modeled in part on Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
(1899, 1902), also about a man who, like Gatsby, remains a mystery and seeks after meanings and values that elude him. In Conrad’s novel, the metaphor of a water journey made against resistance is sustained from the opening lines to this last line:
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the utmost ends of the earth flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.
The phrase “barred by a black bank” might have been an alliterative pattern Fitzgerald was remembering when he wrote the last sentence of
The Great Gatsby
. Unlike Fitzgerald’s sentence, Conrad’s open up and flows, but its forward movement doesn’t bring us anywhere, or, rather, it brings us too far. The “offing” is a part of the sea that is distant but visible from the shore; it marks the distinction between shore and what lies beyond it, and between what is sea and what is not sea. But the first thing we learn about the offing is that we cannot see it because it is barred by black clouds; so our line of vision shifts downward to the “tranquil waterway.” Normally a positive word, “tranquil” is vaguely ominous; the waterway is calm, unruffled, free from agitation, in short, empty and vast, so vast that it has no end (and therefore no beginning or middle); it flows “somber,” that is, dark, gloomy, in shade (from the Latin
sub umbra
); it flows “under an overcast sky,” and while “under” suggests a separation between waterway and sky, the word “overcast”—dark, obscuring—brings the two together in a gloom; and what the waterway flows into is an even vaster darkness. “Black” “clouds,” “somber,” “overcast,” “darkness”—all words with the same connotations, and together they create the “immense darkness” waiting for us at the end of the sentence. The darkness refuses to perform as a period; it just keeps stretching on.
Both Fitzgerald’s and Conrad’s sentences work against the fact that sentences move in time and promise to deliver us somewhere at their conclusion. Their sentences, as we have seen, either flow backward or take us nowhere or take us to the mouth of an unfathomable immensity; they deny us the comfort that sentences, especially last sentences, normally provide, the comfort of being able to order objects and events in comprehensible patterns of cause and effect, past and present, near and far. All those distinctions—distinctions in the absence of which ordinary life could hardly be lived—are casualties of these sentences, and this is even more spectacularly the case with the last sentence of Poe’s
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
(1838), where whiteness does for Poe what darkness does for Conrad. Water is again the (apparently) conveying medium. Two men in a boat are increasingly unable to see anything in front of them as a white “ashy material” covers everything. And then a huge “shrouded human figure” looms ahead, and, suddenly, the abrupt (non)end:
And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.
“Hue” means color, and a figure is something that stands out against a ground. In the absence of a ground, a figure could not be seen, for if it were the same as everything surrounding it, it could not emerge into visibility. That is precisely the case here; the figure that looms before Pym and his companion is indistinguishable from the background frame that would, if it only had a hue, allow it to be picked out. What the unhappy travelers meet in the last second of their voyage is the end of perception. Perception requires both distance and difference (you’re one thing, I’m another), but here there is neither. White snow, white skin, white everything. Skin is usually a covering of something, but in this sentence, it is skin all the way down (a point made formally by the four nested “ofs”). The skin is not only white; it is a perfect white, a white without blemish, without seam, without beginning and end, and therefore without the capacity to provide the reference points that make seeing “it,” as opposed to anything else, possible. In some religious discourses, this is the desired state, the undoing of perceptual distinction in a union with divinity in which the aspirer and the object of aspiration are indistinguishable. Identity, as a function of difference, is no more, and the peace of God and eternity reigns. Obviously not the case in this sentence, where the undoing of perception and of any basis for judgment or decision is the occasion of horror, not unlike the horror Conrad’s Kurtz proclaims in
Heart of Darkness
.
Another name for the state of perceptual dissolution, the state in which separateness and independence are no more and we are one, as Wordsworth said, with the rocks and stones and trees, is death, imagined either as nothing—that seems to be Poe’s imagination—or as the portal to everything. The relationship between peace and death is what Mr. Lockwood thinks about in the last sentence of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
(1847), as he stands above the graves of Heathcliff and Catherine, who are finally at rest after lives of drama, turmoil, and pain: