...story “Happy Endings”, Margaret Atwood uses different literary techniques that can alter the interpretation of the story’s theme. The story starts off with a generic “fairy tale” ending in which a husband and a wife live a happy life together and eventually die. However, as the story progresses, Atwood’s style and tone of the alternate scenarios of John and Mary give off a sense of uncertainty of what main ideas she is trying to convey. Atwood displays her feelings about not only the art of creative writing, but also the equally artistic act of living one's life to the fullest. The unique manner the story is structure, a mixed-up summary of events, begins by saying, "If you want a happy ending, try A," Atwood seemingly gives the reader a choice. It is implied that Story A is the “happy ending and ahead await endings that are much more sinister. Following the first version of the “ending” are various endings, all of which seem to be quite depressing, but nevertheless end with "everything continues as in A." What is the meaning? There are five different adaptations of the “end”; however, all of the characters eventually end up at Story A. This shows Atwood’s cynical attitude about the insignificance of life and is evident in the third story when she explains that the reason John purchased a handgun is "the thin part of the plot and can be explained later" (396). Atwood does not place impact on the events leading to death but instead concentrates on the "happy ending" itself;...
Words: 569 - Pages: 3
...Or is it because of where I live, in average furnishings and a moderate city block? And now I think to myself, is the modern world so frustratingly bound to physical appearance rather than personal depth? Or is it my reclusive nature and timid personality that restrains me from racing down the stairs and potentially entering into my own fairytale? For the adult population of the modern world, in particularly males, the possibility that fairytales and happy endings still exist seems to be a fanciful notion. Perhaps I am a child at heart or more likely delusional in the hope that such “fabrications” of reality that struck a par with me as a young girl do exist in the contemporary world. And whilst years of seemingly perfect yet failed relationships, contradictory evidence and vindictive and damning opposition stack up against me, I still earnestly believe in the literary complex of Prince Charming sweeping me off my feet and into my happy ending. But what if there is the possibility that simply waiting for Prince Charming is not the key to a happy ending? Contemporary women are not forced into chambers guarded by vicious dragons or put under spells that can only be broken by the kiss of their one true love but rather they are bound by ingrained social expectations that prohibit them from realising their happy ending. And with the modern man being so intent on mediocrity, there is only one...
Words: 1006 - Pages: 5
...place and had that happy ending. Now that I am older, I have experience and a more understanding of what love is. Love is not always about romance. Yea, you desire and feel attraction to that person but it is more than that. Later in life when you have a family, there will be different types of ways you can love them. There is also responsibility that comes with that. Love is not always a happy feeling or ending either. Love for the wrong reasons can hurt you just as much as it can make you happy. Love is expectations, the desire to learn and make sacrifices for that person, and understand the different ways love can affect and harm you. I am sure you know the book about Cinderella and the magic slipper. Where the Prince spent a night at the ball with the young pretty girl that was transformed by a fairy. Cinderella had to be back before midnight, if not than she would return back to an ugly maid for her step sisters. She ran as quickly as she can to get back and the slipper that she was wearing fell off. The Prince had every girl in that village try on that slipper so he can one day meet her again. When he finally found her she wasn’t the same pretty girl that night at the ball but an ugly maid. The Prince didn’t care because the connection they had that night made him love her for how she made him feel. This being a fantasy, there was the happy ending. The Prince loved Cinderella so much that after one night at the ball and an unexpected ending, the Prince went...
Words: 1567 - Pages: 7
...In Their Eyes Were Watching God written by Zora Neale Hurston, The ending was happy, this is showcased by ;Janie finding peace with herself, and Tea Cake’s love for Janie. Tea Cake and Janie meet about halfway through the story. Janie has had two unsatisfactory husbands and Tea Cake is the first real gentleman in her life, so they get married. Janie is able to give happily after Tea Cakes death because of the there reasons listed above. Janie returns to eatonville and comes back a changed person. Towards the being of the people saw Janie as a whore. She would find younger men and the town was able to assume the rest. After Tea Cake’s death she could not live in the everglades without Tea Cake, so she went to her old home town. Upon her return, Janie is a lot older and has changed drastically. She was able to reunite with Pheoby her friend and talk about Tea Cake, which was a good emotional release for her. Janie says “”Ah'm satisfied tuh be heah””(Hurston 191). The familiar town where she might have been single, but she lived there like that before. Janie’s cherished her time with...
Words: 714 - Pages: 3
...1996. The British novelist Fay Weldon offers this observation about happy endings. “The writers, I do believe, who get the best and most lasting response from their readers are the writers who offer a happy ending through moral development. By a happy ending, I do not mean mere fortunate events – a marriage or a last minute rescue from death – but some kind of spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation, even with the self, even at death.” Choose a novel or play that has the kind of ending Weldon describes. In a well-written essay, identify the “spiritual reassessment or moral reconciliation” evident in the ending and explain its significance in the work as a whole. Wuthering Heights depicts the story of a vengeful man who exists solely to make those closest to him suffer. Heathcliff, a dark and evil character, is stripped of his other half, his true love, Catherine, at the young age of 12, and dedicates the rest of his life to seeking revenge on those who hurt him. At Catherine’s death, Heathcliff goes mad and wishes that her spirit will haunt him on earth. Heathcliff’s insanity and cruel nature stem from his preclusion of marrying Catherine, and her eventual death. In Charlotte Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s spiritual reassessment comes at the end of his life, when he finally realizes his love for Catherine is more powerful than his need for vengeance. Heathcliff’s love for Catherine was so passionate that it drove him to absurdity at the event of her death...
Words: 622 - Pages: 3
...Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love Title page of the first quarto of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (1600) "Comedy", in its Elizabethan usage, had a very different meaning from modern comedy. A Shakespearean comedy is one that has a happy ending, usually involving marriages between the unmarried characters, and a tone and style that is more light-hearted than Shakespeare's other plays.[13] Comedy (from the Greek: κωμῳδία, kōmōidía), in the contemporary meaning of the term, is any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or to amuse by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film and stand-up comedy. This sense of the term must be carefully distinguished from its academic one, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters.[1] The theatrical genre can be simply described as a dramatic performance which pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye famously depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old",[2] but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation. A later view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth...
Words: 1240 - Pages: 5
...lot of different areas of the story that caught my interest. In the story “Brothers,” Old Li says one thing only for her to contradict herself with a simple action. Old Wang asks, “What if this love was so deep that neither of us would give up the man?” and Old Li responds back saying, “Kill the man” (135). At first it creates a very moving scene, making us believe nothing would get in between...
Words: 1160 - Pages: 5
...often feel lost and confused for the rest of their life. No matter whether that person can get back to the place they were before, their life will forever be altered by the event. Frankly, ‘happy endings’ do not exist at all and living is about how you roll with the punches. Life is full of disappointments, painful memories, drastic devastations and tragedies that can cause serious psychological problems later on. In Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Pi experiences a terrible journey that changes his life forever, consequently, the statement, “This story has a happy ending,” is not a valid conclusion to be made. Pi has a very functional, loving...
Words: 1099 - Pages: 5
...love changed me.. the way i think, the way i act, the way i decide.. sometimes, i even go againsts my principles and beliefs in life.. loving doesn't mean i'll always be happy.. sometimes, all it provides me is pain and misery.. yet i was blinded by strong emotions that i failed to see reality.. sometimes, letting go is the answer.. it hurts like hell, but i will soon realize that it's better to see the person i love to be happy with someone else than to be lonely with me.. how could you probably be friends with someone when everytime you look at that person you want to slap his face and shout: "stop smiling, your stealing my heart.." It's time to let you go, it's time to say goodbye. There's no more excuses, no more tears to cry. There's been so many changes, I was so confused. All along you were the one, all the time I never knew. I want you to be happy, you're my best friend, but it's so hard to let you go now; all that could have been. It's not the goodbye that hurts, but the flashbacks that follow. Second chances dont always mean a happy ending. Sometimes, its just another chance to end things right. I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next....
Words: 265 - Pages: 2
...As the movie was created after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ending had to be adjusted in order to fit with current times. Nevertheless, the ending of the book was much more satisfactory. The ending of the movie was very abrupt and felt as though it brushed aside the struggles the animals had faced for a classic Hollywood happy ending. The questions that George Orwell wanted you to ponder when you had finished his novel were, how much power should the government have over individuals?; what is the limit? How did Animal Farm, a society that prospered and thrived with new hope for animals, come to be worse than Manor Farm? The questions that George Orwell raises are raw and hard-hitting and causes the reader to ponder them and relate them to the real world long after you have finished the novel. While the events that Animal Farm mimicked are over, history has a tendency to repeat itself. Contrary to that, after finishing the movie, all you’ll feel is slight discomfort from the pig’s wet snouts and overall indifference to the movie’s plot because of the overwhelming happy and hopeful ending of the movie . The novel ending causes a spur of emotions in the reader and sticks in the reader’s mind. The animals see the leaders they trusted talk about the exploitation of their citizens and slowly change into Man. The build up of the...
Words: 477 - Pages: 2
...A Long Way Gone Tells about the struggle of young teenage boys in Sierra Leone, Africa, throughout the homicides from the rebels throughout other parts of Africa. This book can bring different moods to you as you read such as, sad mood, anxious thoughts too of what’s going to happen next, and even a happy mood towards the ending. In the first couple chapters, the book gets into introducing the five main boys who tells their life of being a teenager during the homicides in Africa, and the way they live day by day. They describe the condition of the huts (house), which are made out of hard clay, close to concrete in our country. The way I picture these huts is I imagine the movie “ROOTS”. The huts have palms from the palm trees as their roof. Broken up clay, which they use to model the main part of the huts. [Good details here.] The insides, as one of the boys describe it as being very closer phobic, the fact that each hut contains as much as ten family members in each. That part really got to me. Thinking about how I would feel being a teenager with no privacy sharing my room with five people. Getting into the middle, “MAIN PART” of the book. The village needs protection so they have no other choice but to start training young teenage boys how to kill. To me this is a horrible thing because I can just imagine how the mothers of these boys feel, their little boys risking their life to protect the families and friends knowing their lives is in jeopardy. Tears fall down my...
Words: 430 - Pages: 2
...“Phoebe showed me things that reminded her of her mom.” In this quote sal relates to phoebe because sal also kept things that reminded her of her mom. This next quote will show another difference between sal's family and phoebe's family “Am I supposed to leave my things all jammed up in my suitcase all weekend, the guest is supposed to have the best”(154) the quote shows how they are different from when sal is at phoebe's house.this last quote tells the difference in the endings and tells you which story had a happy ending and which had a sad. “Prudence opened the door and we could hear Mrs. winterbottom say “oh sweety”.”(232) this quote reveals that phoebe is the one with the happy...
Words: 621 - Pages: 3
...Jackson State University Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages English 105 Research Paper Rubric ____ I have included my title page. ____ I have included my sentence outline. ____ I have included my table of contents page. ____ I have included my five page body of my research paper. ____ I have included my Works Cited page. ____ I have checked my paper for grammatical accuracy. ____ I have been careful to give my authors credit for the sources I have used. Grammar and Mechanics ________of 20% The writer displays mastery of punctuation and mechanics adhering to grammatical rules. The student uses formal and Standard English avoiding slang and casual language. Content and Subject matter ________of 20% The writer has successfully created a paper displaying original, creative thought and content. There is no redundancy and the writer stays on topic creating an interesting essay for readers. Parallelism, unity, and coherence ________of 20% The writer’s work is clearly organized, and each paragraph adheres to the topic sentence. Additionally, the paper does not ramble and is easily understandable and rational using transitional devices. MLA formatting and documentation ________of 10% The paper adheres to all the strictures of the MLA format including in text citations, direct quotations, and proper Works Cited documentation. Thesis Statement and Application ________of 10% The thesis statement is present and concise...
Words: 2360 - Pages: 10
...After reading “Happy Endings,” for a while I have been thinking about the purpose that Margaret Atwood put into the text. The story is broken up into six different life scenarios that on the first sight have nothing in common. Every scenario in the story ends with death, “John and Mary die. John and Mari die. John and Mary die”. Then what is this sarcastic “happy ending” is about? How is this happy if we all die? One of the memorable moments from the story that caught my attention is a strong message that Margaret Atwood sends to the audience. The author’s point is to show that a human life is unpredictable and we cannot always prepare for everything. Despite this, the life itself is the most important gift we have. Story A on my opinion...
Words: 431 - Pages: 2
...spend time with family and friends. Now how is happiness seen in Fahrenheit 451? At the beginning of the book after Clarisse and Montag meet, Clarisse asks if he is happy. He laughs if off but after a little starts rethinking it. On page 59, Captain Beatty says “People want to be happy, isn’t that right? Haven’t you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well aren’t they? Don’t we keep them moving, don’t we give them fun? That’s all we live for isn’t it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.” In this quote Captain Beatty is stating that the way to make people happy is to provide them with pleasure and fun. What happens in society when the pleasurable and fun things end? No one knows because people are always being provided with the supplies to keep them happy or busy enough that they think...
Words: 788 - Pages: 4
