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Chapter 23: Approaching the Grand Finale: The End’s in Sight!
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In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired
someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest – without
asking to be paid.
—Chinua Achebe (A Man of the People, Heinemann, 1966)
This famous ending of Fitzgerald’s masterpiece shows that although people
are caught up in the flow of time, the roots of their behaviour lie always in
their pasts:
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past.
—F Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Penguin, 1974,
first published 1925)
In the concluding passage of A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s character, about
to be guillotined, still envisages a brighter future for the city and its people,
and hope – even in death:
It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far
better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
—Charles Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities, Penguin Classics, 2003,
first published 1859)
Death
These three novels from different periods all show that, to use a biblical
quote from the Song of Songs, ‘Love is strong as death.’ Eliot’s well-known
last line gives a slight upturn to the tragic end of brother and sister when
they drown in a flood. The fact that it’s a quote from the Book of Samuel in
the Bible, about the love between Saul and Jonathan, gives a hint of immortality
in the love between members of a family:
In their death they were not divided.
—George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss, Wordsworth Classics, 1999,
first published 1860)
The following quiet ending to the story of Stoner’s life marks the moment of
his death, but the preceding paragraphs are incredibly beautiful and give a
depth of meaning and significance to his whole life:
The fingers loosened, and the book they had held moved slowly and then
swiftly across the still body and fell into the silence of the room.
—John Williams (Stoner, Viking, 1965)