The Ending

Vladimir Nabokov wrote about the ending to one of the Anton Chekhov’s stories, “The story does not really end, for as long as people are alive, there is no possible and definitive conclusion to their troubles or hopes or dreams.”

I think that will have to be my standard answer to those who want a different ending than what is provided. 

In the March/April 2010 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, David Jauss has a wonderful piece called “Returning Characters to Life: Chekhov’s Subversive Endings,” and he ends his piece with Virginia Woolf’s comments on Chekhov’s “inconclusive” endings, which are absent “the general tidying up of the last chapter.”  Chekhov doesn’t try to find something agreeable to our vanity, and “as we read these little stories about nothing at all, the horizon widens: the soul gains an astonishing sense of freedom.”

That seems a fine and suitable purpose for stories and art in general.  Not conclusions, but lasting resonance in which to wander.