How Ambiguous Endings Lure Us In

Ambiguity in fiction, when done well, is not an escape hatch for the noncommittal writer. It’s an articulation of something otherwise impossible to articulate.

When discussing successful short stories with my students, we often find ourselves trying to articulate a worthy answer to a single question: How does the writer, in a collection of words, provide the reader an emotional experience that feels impossible to describe, even if we were given infinite words with which to do so? This, of course, is the magic of fiction, as I’ve often heard it described. It’s also a fundamental objective of craft to make a story larger, more emotionally expansive than the space it takes on the page. To put it slightly differently: A story must be greater than the sum of its parts, and good stories are.

But for all the large, indescribable feelings we might be left with at the end, we look down at the manuscript, and all we see is a collection of parts. Herein lies the fun of teaching—helping students identify the methods and techniques for assembling those parts in just the right ways to produce magic. Here’s how I define magic in fiction: the reproduction of a complex emotional experience, one defined by its complexity and, therefore, its inability to be reduced. For example, were we to attempt to convey a simultaneous feeling of extreme joy and extreme misery, the feeling would be cheapened, an undoubtable failure, were we to simply write, “Character A felt immeasurable joy and misery.”

Often, the most complex emotional moment of a story comes at the end. And it can come in the form of one of the most divisive moves in any work of fiction: the ambiguous ending. To deal in ambiguity is to work with a tenuous and volatile balance, and when the reader feels that balance is off, the criticism can be harsh, expressed in a series of gut-punching questions: “Is that it?” “Wait, what?” “After everything, that’s how it ends?” Even when the ambiguity of a story’s ending is effective, it can be hard to articulate exactly how and why.

This is often the case with my introductory creative writing students. They seem to appreciate the ending of Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady with The Dog,” though they aren’t completely sure what it means. To recap, our protagonist, Gurov, a longtime womanizer, sees himself in the mirror and realizes he is aging, passing his sexual peak. At the same time, he realizes he has fallen deeply in love for the first time, with his younger mistress, Anna. They are both married, and the story ends with them trying to contrive a way to be together publicly. My students understand that something compelling is happening, but they aren’t quite sure what it is. Gurov, after all, from the beginning of the story to the end, displays his callousness and jadedness. But undercutting the acts that illustrate these qualities—such as the famous example of him casually eating a slice of watermelon while Anna pours her heart out to him—are little bursts of warmth and affection. So, the students want to know, is Gurov really in love with Anna? Is he a changed man? Or is his apparent love for Anna merely the result of desperation, of seeing his own aged face in the mirror? Will they actually find a way to be together openly? Or does the affair gather its passion from secrecy, from that fact that it isn’t burdened by the mundanity of their public lives?

The story leaves us with more questions than answers, reminding us of Chekhov’s famous adage about the writer’s job being exactly this, which I repeat to my students. They don’t see it as a satisfactory answer in and of itself. So I tell them that the story avoids easy answers and absolute conclusions, reminding us that we’re dealing with matters of the heart, that Gurov is a human being who does not fully understand his own motives. We, readers, are also human, also have blind spots when it comes to human nature, particularly those parts of it—love, self-deception, existential dread—most mystifying.

Students have a similar reaction to the ending of Jhumpa Lahiri’s “A Temporary Matter,” which they find both poignant (it’s the story I teach that most often produces tears) and emotionally confounding. What I try to impress upon my students is that the story is so poignant because it’s confounding, because it deals in emotional ambiguities that can bridge the space between fiction and reality. It does so by conveying an emotional experience too big to be simply described on the page or in our classroom. I create a visual representation of what I’m trying to say using Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Shapes of Stories” lecture, from which I borrow his graph on character fortune. The vertical axis charts our protagonist’s good fortune versus ill fortune. The horizontal axis charts the course of the story from beginning to end.

“A Temporary Matter” begins by relating the misery of its main characters, Shoba and Shukumar, who continue to struggle in the aftermath of a stillbirth. The story’s inciting incident is a notice from their electric company: Every night for five days, their power will be cut in order to repair a downed power line. Considering his recent past, the disaster of his marriage, as well as this added inconvenience, Shukumar, our point-of-view character, begins at a very low point on the graph:

The first night, Shukumar, a stay-at-home PhD student struggling to finish his dissertation, makes dinner before the power goes out. Because of the outage, he and Shoba must eat together, near the light of a couple of old candles. Once they’ve eaten, they can no longer retreat to separate rooms, to their computers and televisions, as they’ve been doing since the tragedy. Shoba initiates a game she played as a child, a simple sharing of secrets. What they reveal is fairly innocuous, but it gets them talking in a way they haven’t in a long time. This first night, therefore, depicts an uptick of Shukumar’s fortune:

On the second night, the secrets they share are a little deeper, a little more potent—she skipped out on dinner with his mother to grab a drink with a friend; he cheated on a college exam. They both seem relieved to make these admissions, and it feels like their intimacy is deepening. The pattern is repeated for a few nights. At one point, they even have sex, proof that we have, in fact, been building to something, as a glance at our graph would suggest:

However, we’ve actually been building to something far more complex than we might be expecting. The power line is fixed ahead of schedule, so their game, the divulging of secrets in the dark, is over.

When they sit down to dinner, the reader feels something is about to happen. We know, at least, that Lahiri must do something to the pattern she’s built. Either she can continue it, Shukumar telling Shoba they’ve grieved too long and love each other too much to let their marriage fail. Or she can do the opposite, have our characters plunge off the stairs to good fortune, saying a teary goodbye.

What she does is more sophisticated. Shoba tells Shukumar she’s been looking at apartments for a while now, and she’s found one. Shukumar realizes this is the admission she was building to. While he thought they were coming closer together, she was actually manufacturing a way to move even further apart. He’s angry and wants to hurt her. So he reveals the secret he knows will do just that: After she delivered their stillborn baby, the nurses took him aside and asked if he’d like to see it. He went to another room and held their dead child in his arms, and though he and Shoba hadn’t wanted to know the baby’s gender, hoping to be spared the pain this might induce, Shukumar knew it was a boy.

At this point, it isn’t difficult to map our gut reaction onto the graph. The downtick is clear: Their marriage is in more peril than we suspected. They’re lashing out, and the pain caused by the things they’ve revealed has potentially destroyed their relationship. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. If the story’s movement was generated by bringing together two characters who are far apart at the beginning, then this moment, agonizing as it might be, achieves its goal. Lahiri highlights their togetherness in the story’s final lines: “Shoba had turned the lights off. She came back to the table and sat down, and after a moment Shukumar joined her. They wept together, for the things they now knew.” Up to this point, their shared misfortune had set them on separate paths of grief. Now those paths have finally merged. It’s painful for the characters, painful for the reader. But now the path to healing might finally be open to them:

Both fortunes coexist in the story’s ending. This is the source of its ambiguity and potency. What I try to impart to my students is that fiction is meant to convey complex emotional states and sentiments that can’t be handled straightforwardly, by a simple recounting. The magic of Lahiri’s ending consists in the range of emotions it contains, a range we could pick apart forever, trying to explain or define. No matter how well we did so, it would never feel as meaningful or accurate as the story itself.

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For introductory creative writing students, the lesson of ambiguity can be confounding and frustrating. During workshop, when I encourage a student to complicate or soften their ending, they often appear unsure, as though they’re being told to unravel the knot they’ve worked painstakingly to tie. In my experience, most students come to introductory creative writing from other disciplines. The majority of the writing they’ve done prior has been expository, meant to teach students to make clear, strong conclusions about a given topic. When they turn their attention to the short story, it only makes sense that those principles inform their approach to fiction.

The endings of my students’ stories often illustrate a number of instinctual questions they must be asking themselves: How will the reader know the story is over if I don’t give them a loud signal? How will they know what the story means if I don’t spell it out for them? What’s the point of writing a story that only suggests possibilities for what could happen next?

I try to help students understand the unique relationship between the writer and reader. The reader of fiction usually does not come to the short story or novel seeking a passive experience. Yes, they need an author to supply characters, stakes, conflicts, settings, and all the other essential story stuff, but if they’re truly going to immerse themselves, invest themselves in your story, they—the reader—need to provide something. It’s our job as writers to leave spaces for our readers to do that. Creating these spaces can happen in the small scale, such as when you avoid too many details when describing something, allowing the picture to complete itself in the reader’s imagination, or when giving a character a strange trait, allowing the reader to supply meaning, motive, or even backstory. And in the large scale, of course, sometimes stories leave us with little more than questions as to what happens next.

One popular example: Stephen King’s novella The Mist. The story is about a father and son who, after a storm, go to their small town’s grocery store for supplies. Shortly after they arrive, a heavy mist descends upon them, a mist that conceals deadly monsters. There are potential clues as to where these monsters came from, the most likely among them a military experiment gone wrong. However, this isn’t the ambiguity the story is working toward. Rather, the ambiguity begins in the moments the father must answer questions for his young son: questions about what’s going on, what will happen to them, what has likely happened to the boy’s mother, who they left back home, vulnerable in a house that has a number of broken windows and easy access points. The father must decide whether to tell his son the unsettling truth or concoct a hopeful lie, whether to let his son in on the secret of adult life—that it is filled with uncertainty and danger—or whether to preserve his childhood innocence as long as possible, even as they inch closer toward a potentially devastating ending.

This dilemma is bigger than the father-son relationship. It’s a question for the reader, and one for the writer as well, both of whom are struggling with it during the course of the story. While things completely devolve inside the store—the town’s religious zealot ends up creating a cultlike community of violence and coercion—our father and son and a few other characters we’ve come to like escape from the store. They learn that the worst is true: The mist has taken over the entire town. The very last moment of the story finds them holding out in an abandoned Howard Johnson’s. In the manager’s office, the father finds a battery-operated radio. Through all the silence and static, he thinks he hears one word: the name of a city. The father, our narrator, articulates the thinness of whatever hope this inspires: “I couldn’t be sure. That is the thing, the damned thing. It might have been my imagination, nothing but wish fulfillment. And even if not, it is such a long chance. How many miles? How many bridges? How many things that would love to tear up my son and eat him even as he screamed in terror and agony?” As bleak as it seems, the novella ends with the father whispering two words into his sleeping son’s ear. The first is the name of the city, Hartford; the other is the word hope.

The question: What happens to the characters we’ve spent over a hundred pages with?

The answer: We don’t know.

The question: Why would a writer end a story this way?

The answer: The story’s ending is not a means for Stephen King to avoid committing to a narrative conclusion. Instead, the ambiguousness of what happens next is a productive moment for the story. During the toughest moments of our lives, there is no simple solution or standard answer to the question of whether to reach for despair or hope. If Stephen King’s novella is successful, then the ultimate fate of our characters rests entirely with the reader. On a given day, a reader might supply the hopeful ending, tracing a path from the end of the story to salvation in Hartford. That same reader, on a different day, is within their rights to supply the opposite ending. In either case, the story will have effectively reached beyond the page and touched something within that reader, something they were likely in need of.

This is the power of an ambiguous ending. It becomes another act, one the reader writes for themselves, using the inventory the writer has provided. A story that offers an absolute ending can be an escape from reality, which isn’t without its merits. But a story that works toward an ambiguous ending becomes a mirror for the reader, allowing them to see themselves through the truly unique lens of fictional experience.

Ultimately, I tell my students, ambiguity in fiction gains its power from a simple fact: In life, sometimes, often, we just don’t know. We don’t know what others think or how they feel about us. Nor is it always a straightforward affair to know what we are thinking or feeling. Our lives are filled with more questions than answers, and the realm of literary fiction is one of the few places we can go to consider this predicament.

Fiction offers an experience unlike any other. In life, we try to make things as neat as possible. We clear paths and avoid confrontation. We avoid difficult problems in favor of simple, peace-keeping solutions. We subdue our desires when we suspect they’ll become intrusive; we subdue our fears in order to get a good night’s rest. But sometimes, these things bubble over, causing us pain or discomfort, and we must choose how we want to explore the good, the bad, the questions for which there are no answers. Ambiguity in fiction, when done well, is not an escape hatch for the noncommittal writer. It’s an articulation of something otherwise impossible to articulate. Learning to embrace ambiguity is crucial to a writer’s development, on the page and off.