Authors: Jordan Rosenfeld
Au revoir tristesse.
Jackson drove with the top down, the Dixie Chicks playing loudly on the car stereo. He picked them up at Montpelier Airport. They
were dressed ready for the convertible, in chiffon head scarves and sunglasses, so that Julia looked like a fifties movie star and Amelia didn't. Julia had said on the phone that Amelia was a lot more cheerful these days, but if she was then she was keeping it to herself, sitting in the backseat of his new BMW M3, harrumphing and grunting at everything that Julia said. Jackson suddenly regretted not buying the two-seater BMW Z8 instead — then they could have put Amelia in the boot.
Now contrast that with the Jackson Brodie the reader met at the beginning of the narrative, who was having trouble quitting smoking, dealing with car and work troubles, and fighting with his ex-wife:
Jackson switched on the radio and listened to the reassuring voice of Jenni Murray on
Woman's Hour.
He lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one because he had run out of matches, and faced with a choice between chain-smoking or abstinence, he'd taken the former option because it felt like there was enough abstinence in his life already. If he got the cigarette lighter on the dashboard fixed he wouldn't have to smoke his way through the packet, but there were a lot of other things that needed fixing on the car and the cigarette lighter wasn't high on the list. Jackson drove a black Alfa Romeo 156 that he'd bought secondhand four years ago for £13,000 and that was now probably worth less than the Emmelle Freedom mountain bike he had just given his daughter for her eighth birthday (on the proviso that she didn't cycle on the road until she was at least forty).
Notice how in both scenes he's driving in a car and listening to the radio, yet the feeling of the first scene is tense and cranky—while the final scene is relaxed and free and improved upon. In the final scene, he's driving a new BMW, not a lemon of an Alfa Romeo. He's not worrying about his ex-wife or his daughter, and whereas in the first scene he had "enough abstinence in his life," now he's got the prospect of a relationship with a new woman.
Counterpointing your first scene is a wonderful way to provide a definitive sense of closure and change to your narrative. Look back at your first scene and see how you can set up a similar one in terms of the setting and other small details, but change the tone, pace, and interior monologue to show that your protagonist is clearly in a different place from where he started.
Reflective Exposition
Reflective exposition is another strong way to kick off your concluding scene. Since the final scene is a time for reflection—after all, you've just spent a novel or story's worth of time dealing with actions and interactions, putting your protagonist in conflict and danger, and keeping tension and drama alive—interior monologue and exposition can be a natural fit here.
In Janet Fitch's
Paint It Black,
protagonist Josie Tyrell has finally gotten a glimpse into the life and mind of her boyfriend, Michael, who committed suicide at the start of the book. She has driven to the hotel where he did it, read the journal entry he made just before, and come to understand the family he came from. Now she's left to pick up the pieces of her life and carry on:
Josie sat on the bed in number 4, smoking a ciggie. The sunlight shone bright and cold through the open door. She knew it was time to leave. There was nothing else to do but pack up and head home. And yet, how could she leave this place where he'd made his end? She sat up against the rickety headboard and picked cholla spines out of the bedspread, flicking them into the ashtray. Maybe she should take up knitting. Something quiet and productive. She didn't want to go back home, back to the empty house, as if Michael had fallen through a hole in the ice and just disappeared. But she couldn't drag his raw death through her days like this, like a giant bleeding moose head.
When you open with interior monologue, you can drop the reader directly into the mood, emotion, or thematic state you want him to be in for the finale. If you want to set the stage for redemption, forgiveness, acceptance, or any of the larger themes of literature, interior monologue and exposition allow you to do this quickly and to the point, since final scenes are not often very long—they are merely bookends to your protagonist's journey.
establishing the right pace
Your final scene does not need to have the same dramatic structure as all other scenes. Your significant situation is over, and your protagonist has undergone his changes. Your final scene does not require you to set a new intention that must be carried out. It is the place to let your protagonist rest and reflect, and for you to convey a feeling, an image, or a sense of theme to the reader. Therefore, the pace tends to be slower. Actions are small and kept to a minimum, with attention to details that elicit your character's inner life and attitudes, hopes and feelings.
Let's look at a few excerpts from the middles of final scenes. Notice their pacing, how they feel slower, quieter, and more reflective.
Author Louise Erdrich uses setting details to bring her pace down in the final scene of her novel
The Painted Drum.
Protagonist Faye Travers, whose sister died young, has just been through an intense relationship with a local sculptor whose teenage daughter was killed, resurrecting Faye's own grief. The novel has spent a lot of time focusing on the loss of children and on grief—and Faye herself has pushed much of her own grief away. By the end, however, her experiences have softened her, and she's ready to face things as they are. In the final scene she goes to visit her sister's grave:
My sister's stone marker is very distinctive. It's a carved angel that our mother bought from a church about to be demolished and had engraved with the date and name. Perhaps because the angel was not meant as a memorial in the first place, there is something stealthily alive about her—wings that flare instead of droop, an alert and outwardly directed expression, a hand clutched to her breast not as a gesture of reverence or sorrow, but, I think, breathless delight.
There is little action in this scene—the most Faye does is clear away the debris that has piled up on her sister's headstone—because actions are not necessary. Notice, too, that despite being in a cemetery, at her sister's grave, Faye seems optimistic. You can feel her grief lifting in the way she describes the angel on her sister's marker as being "stealthily alive" and clutching her breast with "breathless delight." This final scene is pointing toward positive change. Faye is freed from her grief, and this is shown to us in the details.
Setting details are powerful when you want to slow down the pace and convey mood. In your final scene, ask yourself how you can direct the reader's focus onto small details in a way that also creates the tone you're shooting for. For example, if your story was about a criminal who finds redemption, in the final scene you could use images that convey freedom and forgiveness—like a bird flying across the expanse of the Grand Canyon, or another character offering your protagonist his hand. These details will help you to bring your pace down to reflect the tone of your narrative.
You can also slow your pacing down in the final scene by dropping into the realm of metaphors, which have a timeless quality. In Margaret Atwood's novel
The Robber Bride,
three women—Tony, Roz, and Charis—have been personally injured by one woman, Zenia, whom they all met in college. Ze-nia is a masterful manipulator who has always selfishly put herself before others, and who even manages to fake her death and stage a funeral. But she is not dead at all, and she continues to wreak injustice on the three friends until, finally, the women stop her for good.
In the final scene, Tony reflects upon what has happened and who Zenia was in a series of metaphoric reflections that slow the pace and aim for an emotional finish:
No flowers grow in the furrows of the lake, none in the fields of asphalt. Tony needs a flower, however. A common weed, because wherever else Zenia had been in her life, she had also been at war. An unofficial war, a guerilla war, a war she may not have known she was waging, but a war nevertheless.
Who was the enemy? What past wrong was she seeking to avenge? Where was her battlefield? Not in any one place. It was in the air all around, it was in the texture of the world itself; or it was nowhere visible, it was in among the neurons, the tiny incandescent fires of the brain that flash up and burn out. An electric flower would be the right kind for Zenia, a bright, lethal flower like a short circuit, a thistle of molten steel going to seed in a burst of sparks.
There are images of war and of flowers—two very powerful contrasting metaphors that sum up the themes of the novel nicely. Metaphors often show up in literary novels, but you'll find them even in genre works because they say so much with so few words.
THE FINAL SENTENCES
In the final scene, the last two to three sentences (and especially the last one) are like DNA—they carry the feeling of the entire novel with them, even beyond your narrative. They should leave an emotional flavor that speaks to the entire journey your protagonist has undergone. Here we'll look at final sentences that end with action, reflection, and images.
Final Actions
The reader likes to know that the characters she's come to love will live on. Actions have a way of making characters' lives feel still in motion even after the book or story is over. So you may decide to end your final scene with your protagonist taking a symbolic action or gesture. I stress
symbolic.
If you end on an action, it should suggest a larger action than the mundane—it should conjure a feeling of an action the protagonist is taking in his life.
In
The Robber Bride,
for instance, the action doesn't come until the final sentence. In much of the final scene Tony is outside reflecting on the damage Zenia wrought—she caused her to mistrust other women, to hate them even, at times. The final paragraphs show Tony outside staring at a pottery statue of Zenia, thinking, and then being drawn to the sounds of her friends inside. The scene could easily end at the finish of these paragraphs, reflectively:
Tony picks her up and turns her over, probes and questions, but the woman with her glazed pottery face does nothing but smile.
From the kitchen she hears laughter, and the clatter of dishes. Charis is setting out the food, Roz is telling a story. That's what they will do, increasingly in their lives: tell stories. Tonight their stories will be about Zenia.
Was she in any way like us? thinks Tony. Or, to put it another way around: Are we in any way like her?
But Atwood has Tony make one last action, a symbolic one:
Then she opens the door, and goes in to join the others.
For Tony, rejoining her friends is an important action that suggests she is ready to open herself again to women friends. That final action crystallizes all of Tony's thoughts and tells the reader that Tony has healed.
Final actions should speak to how your protagonist is going to behave differently in the world now that he has survived the trials of your narrative. Think symbolically. Ask yourself how a small action can convey a larger meaning. Your protagonist could be staring down a dirt road at the end of a narrative in which he has been afraid to make choices. As his final action, he can walk down the unknown road, for example. Symbolic actions carry weight at the end of a narrative and will give your final scene a feeling that there is more to come for your protagonist.
Final Reflections and Thoughts
By the end of the narrative, the reader can tell how the protagonist has changed, but it may still be unclear how the protagonist feels about his changes or about something that took place in the narrative. In this case, a direct expression of feelings is needed.
In Chuck Palahniuk's novel
Invisible Monsters,
a novel about identity and about learning to accept oneself in whatever way possible, the narra-tor—formerly a fashion model—is shot in the face early in the narrative and must undergo massive facial reconstruction, losing her beauty entirely. While in the hospital, she meets Brandy Alexander, a man in the process of undergoing sex reassignment surgery to become a woman. Brandy's female form looks uncannily like Shannon used to look before her accident. At the end of the novel, the reader isn't quite sure how Shannon feels about herself, now that her beauty is gone. What the reader knows is that she has made some sort of peace with the past and found friendship in an unlikely source—Brandy. The final sentences convey Shannon's feelings on her identity:
Completely and totally, permanently and without hope, forever and ever I love Brandy Alexander.
And that's enough.
Brandy represents the self she used to hate—who was pretty on the outside, but tortured within. By admitting her love for Brandy, she does in effect admit to loving herself.
A summary thought or reflection on your narrative works best when it is unclear how the narrator feels at the end, or if there has been some sort of gray area or waffling about feelings. A final thought sums it up so the reader can rest with a sense of understanding.
Final Images
Images resonate with the reader more than actions or interior monologue because they speak the language of the subconscious—they directly trigger emotional responses without an intellectual interpretation.