How many endings to stories are there?
September 25, 2013 11:06 AM   Subscribe

Various writers and critics through the years have claimed that there are only X plots (with X being pretty variable) and at the end of the day, all stories boil down to one of those plots. But today I'm asking specifically about endings. How many different endings can there be, and what are the main ones?

For example, here's an ending that shows up in Star Wars, and plenty of other stories: And so the precious thing is saved [Rebel base and life of Princess in this case], and the heroes, having overcome their differences to save it, celebrate while the villain slinks off to lick his wounds and plot revenge.

Pretty much every superhero origin story ends sort of like: Having defeated the villain and repaired his character flaws, the protagonist sets out on the road to being the hero he has become.

A lot of westerns, hard-boiled detective stories, and post-apocalyptic adventures end with: Having saved the helpless innocents from the villain and restored order, the hero disappears into the wilderness as mysteriously as he appeared.

So how many of these are there? Can we combine and collapse and arrive at a relatively small number of endings that cover pretty much any story we can think of? (Granting that there are always, always things that don't fit into neat categories.)
posted by Naberius to Writing & Language (11 answers total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
Everyone dies.

Everyone dies, save for the sole survivor.
posted by fikri at 11:11 AM on September 25, 2013


Don't forget "getting the girl." Or guy.

The only movie I've seen (aside from art haus type stuff) that subverts these endings is "Powder" where the main character doesn't really have an arc, but the story is really about how the lives around him were changed. So the "idiot/savage/wild-wisdom" transforms the village kind of a thing.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 11:13 AM on September 25, 2013


Here are some.

No I will not put a TVTropes warning in front of the link! You will all suffer as I have suffered; your time now belongs to TVTropes! Your very lives! Muahahahaha!
posted by Wretch729 at 11:17 AM on September 25, 2013 [6 favorites]


Comedy and tragedy.
posted by 256 at 11:18 AM on September 25, 2013


This could head way off into chatfilter territory, but I'll chuck in Propp's functions of the Russian folk tale. Even though formalism isn't particularly fashionable, what's interesting about this analysis is that a lot of those functions can work equally well at the beginning, middle or end of a narrative.

The "sense of an ending" has long coexisted with the sense that endings are artificial. The Iliad starts in the middle of things and ends with the burial of Hector, not the fall of Troy. Shakespeare's late plays can be understood, to some degree, as narrative experiments: what happens when you start your play with the end of a tragedy and end it with the beginning of a comedy?
posted by holgate at 11:25 AM on September 25, 2013 [1 favorite]


Riffing on 256 it's traditional that comedies end in a wedding and tragedies in a funeral. You see that pattern a lot in movies and such today (and like holgate says Shakespeare liked to play with the trope).
posted by Wretch729 at 11:27 AM on September 25, 2013


There are a nearly infinite number of ways to end a story. Ending them in a way that is satisfying to the audience or reader is another thing entirely.

If you want to get into very, very broad, boiled-down versions, I will tell you what I think and you can go from there:

There are really only two ways to end a story, with two subcategories each, so four in total.

Either it ends with a wedding, or it ends with a funeral.

The third option, in which neither happens, is useless, because it means the characters have gone nowhere and done nothing, and remain back where they are, unchanged. This can be done, and has been, but it's important to understand that any rule of writing can be broken if you can pull it off.

Now, obviously, we are at a point where most stories don't end with a wedding or a funeral anymore (and the ones that do are often doing it in reference to classical works), so I want to be clear that I'm speaking in broad and kind of metaphorical terms.

There are exceptions, but they're rare, so when I say "every," I suppose I mean "more or less every." Anyway. Every story is basically about someone who wants something, the things in the way of what they want, what they do to overcome the things in the way of what they want, and how the experience changes them. Consider the wedding to represent the characters (or the viewer) getting what they want. Consider the funeral to represent the same people not getting what they want.

So there are four endings, with many individual variations on all of them:

You get what you want and you're happy about it.
You get what you want and you're not happy about it.

Or,

You don't get what you want and you're not happy about it.
You don't get what you want and you're happy about it.

And that's pretty much it. There are exceptions, but the above will cover almost every story you'll read or watch.
posted by FAMOUS MONSTER at 11:31 AM on September 25, 2013 [12 favorites]


FAMOUS MONSTER basically has it. The number of possible endings (or stories for that matter) depends on the level of abstraction you're willing to put on looking at it. The field of study that goes into this is called Narratology. An example of the more granular (as in there are moar types of stories) taxonomy would the kind proposed by Propp in Morphology of the Folktale, on the other end of the spectrum (and the source escapes me) I've read a model in which all stories boil down into two types:
initial situation->something occurs to disrupt that situation->action takes place which attempts to "correct" this disruption->the attempt fails or succeeds
posted by juv3nal at 11:46 AM on September 25, 2013


Good answers.

I'd also add my favourite kind of story start: 'What does the protagonist want, why can't they get it and why do we give a shit?'

If you can't answer this your story is bad.
posted by Sebmojo at 4:23 PM on September 25, 2013 [2 favorites]


A slightly less serious, but still interesting answer can be found at this grid of interacting genres and twists at dresden codak.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 5:38 PM on September 25, 2013


Kurt Vonnegut says about 3: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oP3c1h8v2ZQ‎
posted by jander03 at 9:46 PM on September 25, 2013


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