How great novels end: seven kinds of last page

I read the last page of a novel first more often than I admit in company. Not to spoil it, or not only. I want to know what kind of ending the book is going to attempt, because that tells me what kind of book it is. A novel that ends in a wedding is making a different bargain with me than one that ends with a man walking off into the dark, and I like to know the terms.

Over years of this bad habit I have come to think that most great endings fall into a handful of kinds. The list below has seven. It is not a theory, and plenty of novels mix two or three kinds on a single page. But naming the kinds helps you notice what a writer chose, and what they turned down.

The classics here are old enough to discuss openly. Where a newer book comes up, there is a warning first.

1. The marriage close

The oldest settled ending in the English novel is the wedding, or the news of one. Comedy ends in marriage the way tragedy ends in death: the community is restored, the right people are paired, and the story has nowhere left to go.

Pride and Prejudice (1813) is the model, but look at what Austen actually does on her last page. The wedding is already behind us. The final sentence is about Darcy and Elizabeth's gratitude to the Gardiners, "the persons who, by bringing her into Derbyshire, had been the means of uniting them." The book that opened with a joke about fortunes and wives closes on an aunt and uncle who took a niece on a holiday. The marriage close, done well, is about more than the couple. It shows you the web of people who made the match possible.

Jane Eyre (1847) turns the convention inside out. Its last chapter opens with "Reader, I married him," with Jane as the grammatical subject and the one doing the marrying. Brontë puts the wedding at the start of the final chapter and spends the rest of it on what the marriage is like.

2. The death

A death is the most final thing a novel can offer, and so the most tempting. The danger is that it becomes a way to stop rather than a way to end.

George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) ends in a flood. Tom and Maggie Tulliver drown together in the boat, and the book closes on their tomb and its inscription: "In their death they were not divided." After a whole novel about a brother and sister who could not understand each other, death gives them the unity life refused. Some readers find it too convenient. I find it devastating and a little too neat, which may be the same thing.

Anna Karenina (book form 1878) is the more instructive case, because the death is not the ending. Anna dies at the close of Part Seven. Tolstoy then writes a whole Part Eight: Vronsky leaving to fight in Serbia, and Levin on his estate, working his way toward faith and toward the plain decision that his life can still be pointed at the good. Readers who expect the book to stop at the railway station are often annoyed. But the novel was always two novels, Anna's and Levin's, and by giving Levin the last word Tolstoy tells you which question he thought mattered most: not how a life is lost, but how one is lived.

3. The return home

The homecoming ending brings the hero back to the place they started, changed, so that the place looks different. It is as old as the Odyssey. In The Return of the King (1955), after the battles and the coronations, Tolkien gives the last line to Sam Gamgee at his own front door: "Well, I'm back," he said.

Great Expectations (1861) has the most famous return in Victorian fiction, and the most argued over, because Dickens wrote it twice. In the original ending, Pip, still single, meets Estella by chance in a London street. She has been widowed from Bentley Drummle and remarried. They talk briefly and part, and Pip takes comfort that suffering has given her a heart. Edward Bulwer-Lytton thought this too sad, and Dickens rewrote it before publication. The novel ran as a weekly serial in All the Year Round before Chapman and Hall issued it in three volumes.

In the published ending, Pip goes back to the site of Satis House, Miss Havisham's ruined home, and finds Estella there in the evening. The last sentence brings back the mists from the morning Pip first left the forge, and ends: "I saw no shadow of another parting from her." The return home is what makes the second version work. Pip comes back to the ground where his expectations began, and the mists close a circle. Whether he and Estella marry is left a little open, and I will come back to that kind of ending in a later piece.

4. The open door

Some novels end with a departure. The story is over, but the character walks out into a future the book will not show. The door is left open and the reader stands in it.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is the classic American case. Huck has had enough of being civilized, and on the last page he announces that he reckons he has to "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest." The final words, "I been there before," are a refusal. Huck has seen how this story ends for boys like him, adopted and schooled and tamed, and he will not stay for it.

The open door is different from an unfinished ending. Twain knows exactly where Huck stands at the close. What he leaves open is what lies ahead, not what has happened.

5. The epilogue that jumps years

The epilogue steps away from the last scene and tells you what came after: who married, who died, who moved to the city. It is a summing up, and in the nineteenth century it was close to a duty. Readers had lived with these people for hundreds of pages and wanted to know how things turned out.

Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869) has two epilogues. The first, headed with the years 1813 to 1820, leaves the war behind and settles into the domestic lives of the Rostovs and Bezukhovs, with a long sequence on the eve of St. Nicholas in December 1820. The book that started in drawing rooms and battlefields closes in a nursery and a study.

Middlemarch (1871 to 1872) ends with a Finale that does the same work in a few pages, and does it better than almost anyone. It is also short enough to read closely, so I will use it below for the worked example.

6. The reversal

The reversal ending turns the whole book over. The last chapters reveal something that changes the meaning of everything before.

The pure plot version is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), where the narrator, Dr. Sheppard, turns out to be the murderer. It works because Christie never lies outright. She lets Sheppard leave things out, and on a reread you can see every gap.

Spoilers for the ending of The Remains of the Day follow.

Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989, winner of the Booker Prize that year) has a quieter reversal, one of recognition. Stevens, the butler, has spent the novel defending his years of service to Lord Darlington and the dignity he believes it gave him. Near the end he sits on a bench on a seaside promenade at evening and admits, to a stranger, that Darlington's mistakes leave him unable to claim even that dignity for himself. The stranger tells him the evening is the best part of the day. Nothing in the plot changes. Everything in Stevens's account of his life does.

7. The quiet image

The last kind is the one writers love most and attempt most often: the novel that ends not on an event but on a picture, held still.

Wuthering Heights (1847) closes with Lockwood at three headstones by the moor, Catherine's between Edgar's and Heathcliff's. After a book full of storms, ghosts and cruelty, Brontë ends on moths among the heath and harebells and a soft wind in the grass, and Lockwood wondering how anyone could imagine "unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." The irony is gentle and huge. We have spent the novel learning that the dead here do not rest quietly at all.

The Great Gatsby (1925) ends on an image that is also an argument. Nick looks across the water, thinks of the Dutch sailors who first saw "a fresh, green breast of the new world," and of Gatsby's green light, and the book closes: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." There is no event in it. There is only rowing, and the current, and a whole country's habit of reaching for what is already gone.

Worked example: the last paragraph of Middlemarch

Here is the final paragraph of Middlemarch, one sentence at a time, with what each sentence does.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible.

The first sentence answers a question the novel raised in its Prelude, about women born with the ardor of a Saint Theresa who end up founding nothing. Eliot grants Dorothea her "fine issues," then adds the limit straight away: not widely visible. The sentence is built as concession, and the concession is the point.

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.

The second sentence turns the concession into an image. Cyrus, the story goes, punished a river by dividing it into hundreds of small channels. Dorothea's energy has been divided the same way, into a marriage, a household, a local life. "No great name on the earth" sounds like a loss, and Eliot lets it sound that way for exactly one sentence.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The last sentence does three jobs. "But" reverses the loss: divided water still waters fields. Then the claim widens from Dorothea to "the world," and then, without warning, to "you and me." The reader is suddenly inside the argument, as a beneficiary of people like her. And the final phrase lands on a grave, as so many endings do, but a grave nobody visits. It is a death ending, an epilogue and a quiet image at once, and it turns the whole long novel into a case for the value of ordinary lives.

Notice the length, too. The sentences grow: short, longer, longest. Eliot paces the paragraph so the reader's breath runs out where the book does.

A modern title that asks the question

Some novels make the ending their subject from the cover. Salvatore Scibona's first novel, The End (Graywolf Press, 2008), is set in an Italian immigrant neighborhood of Cleveland on August 15, 1953, the Feast of the Assumption. The title points several ways at once: to a death, to the end of a faith, to the end of a neighborhood and a way of immigrant life. The book travels back through decades and then returns to the feast day, so the last chapters show you the same streets with everything you have since learned. Our reader's guide to The End walks through its structure and, in a marked section, its ending.

Using the seven kinds

When you finish a novel, try naming its ending. Most will be one of these kinds with a second one folded in: a marriage with an epilogue, a death that becomes an image, a homecoming that opens a door. Then ask what the writer turned down. Dickens turned down a parting for a return. Tolstoy turned down a death for a life. That refusal often tells you more about a book than the ending it settled for.

More pieces on how books close will collect on the endings shelf, and reading and writing resources live in the back matter.