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Chapter 23: Approaching the Grand Finale: The End’s in Sight!
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In Henry James’s novel, will Isabel go back to her husband or in the end
choose Warburton? He may wait a while to find out, but readers have to wait
forever:
She walked him away with her, however, as if she had given him now the
key to patience.
—Henry James (The Portrait of a Lady, Penguin, 1974,
first published 1881)
The ending of Great Expectations is doubly ambiguous and is one of two that
Dickens wrote. In the other version, which Dickens wrote first, Pip meets
Estella briefly by chance at the end of the novel. The current ending remains
ambiguous: will Pip marry Estella or is he mistaken?
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as the
morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so, the evening
mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil light
they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.
—Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, Penguin, 1996,
first published 1861)
Homecoming
Can characters ever truly return home, because surely either they’ve changed
or their homes are different? The character in Anita Brookner’s novel discovers
that nothing will ever be just as it was:
But, after a moment, she thought that this was not entirely accurate and,
crossing out the words ‘Coming home’, wrote simply ‘Returning’.
—Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac, 1984, Jonathan Cape)
Waugh’s social comedy is a classic ‘voyage and return’ story in which the
character comes back with a new identity but resumes his uneventful life,
revealed in this most ordinary of endings:
Then he turned out the light and went into his bedroom to sleep.
—Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall, Chapman & Hall, 1928)
After all the adventures and drama of Tolkien’s great epic, Sam arrives home
to sit in front of the fire with his daughter on his lap:
‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.
—JRR Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings, Allen & Unwin, 1955)