Happy Endings

There isn't much that's more selfish than the idea of a happy ending. This story, while jaded and bitter, had some really awesome points.

It really made me think about happy endings, and about how EVERYONE IS THE MAIN CHARACTER OF THEIR OWN LIFE.

This, in connection with the idea of a "happy ending", entails two things:

A. When the point of view character ends happily, there is no second thought given to secondary characters welfare in deciding if an ending is a happy one. In several parts of Happy Endings, people were cheated on, people died by tsunamis and bad hearts, people killed themselves, and people killed other people, or various combinations of several of them. This doesn't matter, because reader focus is on the main character.

B. In the life of, say, the victim of any one of the aforementioned, there were no happy endings. Their stories end with them dead, overdosed on drugs and cheap liquor; shot; cheated on; dying of bad hearts. Bummers. No one would read them.

We forget that other people are real people.

Walt Whitman, throughout his poetry, and especially in Song of Myself, stresses the importance "of imagining others with infinite complexity" because of this: every one of them are breathing, every one is the protagonist.

Other than that, Happy Endings said something else that I found interesting. "So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with."

This seems true both in life and in books. Endings, of life, of relationships, of any good thing, and even plenty of bad things you wouldn't expect to miss, are downers. The beginnings are filled with potential and promise. Everyone loves a new start.

Book with happy endings, especially love stories usually don't actually end at the end. "Happily ever after" is an ending that happens during the honeymoon, and cuts out, fades to black before the first argument over who does the laundry, or who put the kids to bed last, and not making bills. And they especially don't end with John and Mary dead.

I like "happy middles" best. Happy "endings" hardly ring true, and leave nothing to the imagination. Tom and Huck will always be little boys on adventures in my mind, because I never read of them being onld and grey and drinking ale looking out into the sunset on their porches together, retired and near-end, thinking about the good old days. Certainly you can't leave a dangling middle, where you don't know if the outcome is for good or for bad, but leaving on a happy moment between acts of life, after the first argument, when you know they can both do laundry, and sometimes someone has to sleep on the couch, but that maybe they'll be okay. That's my favorite ending.