How do you write resonant endings?

This post discusses the ending of Matrix.

I’ve analyzed a number of openings so far in this series, but we haven’t yet discussed endings. In many ways, endings should be harder to execute than openings, right? The entire weight of the novel is flying through the air, and the novelist must bring it safely to rest, making the reader feel they have completed a journey. In my decade of experience working with writers, however, I’ve learned that it is much harder to get the plane off the ground than to bring it in for a landing.

By the end of the novel, after all, the writer knows the entire shape of the story; the decisions have been made and the landing can happen almost on autopilot. Readers too will generally have an intuitive sense of what the ending will deliver, especially in genre fiction—order restored, love won, victory secured. Unlike in the opening, when readers must meet all of a novel’s characters and learn about the setting—be persuaded to walk onto the plane and take the journey—by the end, the story world will be almost as familiar to readers as it is to the writer.

The plot requirements of the ending are fairly obvious: Answer all open story questions, weave loose plot threads into the story, and show that your characters have learned their lessons and completed the arcs that will leave them at rest—even if it is just temporary rest. But there is one further, less obvious step: Ring the gong of your central theme one last time so it can continue to resonate for the reader even after they’ve closed the book.

Let’s look at how Lauren Groff accomplishes these steps in Matrix. The last chapter of the novel is broken into two scenes, which are stylistically very different from one another. In the first, we are with Marie on her deathbed, where we’d left her at the end of the previous chapter. The first line of the chapter orients us immediately: “Marie sickens deeper.” The point of view is tightly focused on Marie, though in the first paragraphs of the scene she can still hear the voices of the nuns around her: “Someone is saying now that the poor abbess has been ill longer than she has admitted. She has been gasping in her pain and pressing her hand to the space between her breasts for years. Feel now. There is a rock in there.” Marie can still respond in her thoughts if not out loud and muses about the deaths of her grandmother and mother before her from the same disease. “It will be soon now,” she thinks.

After that moment, the scene modulates into stream of consciousness as we track Marie’s last moments—her struggles for breath, her desire to warn her nuns about the last judgment, then her release of responsibility. The last movement of the passage is to take Marie from body to spirit, carrying readers with her over that gulf:

The stripped-down sentences allow readers to stay focused on interior emotion rather than external details, and Groff gives them plenty of white space to resonate. The last words of the scene echo the first chapter of Genesis: “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” The language has the richness and allusiveness of poetry, allowing readers to linger with Marie in her final moments.

From a plot standpoint, ending the novel with Marie’s death feels natural. The novel opened with her journey to the abbey where she completed her life’s work, bringing an impoverished community into health and power. This last scene also finishes her character arc, which leads her from faithlessness to a kind of faith that centers female power—note her final vision of God as “sole, female.”

But Marie’s death is the climax, so let’s look now at the falling action in the last scene of the chapter. Here is the opening paragraph:

Note the sharp stylistic change. We are in a distanced point of view, focused on external details conveyed in long, complex sentences. The older nuns, those few who are old enough to remember the dire straits of the abbey when Marie came to it, tell their stories of hunger, plague, and hopelessness. In contrast to the spare writing in the final scene in Marie’s point of view, here we get lush detail, as in this one long sentence heaped with nouns:

Slowly the point of view of the scene comes to focus on Tilde, now abbess in Marie’s place. Plagued by dreams after Marie’s death, she goes to the chapel to pray and sees a shimmer she believes to be Marie’s spirit. The shimmer leads her to a small volume she remembers seeing Marie writing in; when she opens it she discovers records of Marie’s visions—those that led to the building of the labyrinth and to Marie hearing confession, but others too, of a kiss between Eve and the Virgin Mary, of god as an egg-laying hen.

Tilde wrestles with what to do with the book. She knows just how dangerous it is: “had such visions as these seeped into the world during her lifetime, Abbess Marie would have been burned a heretic at the stake and all the sisters in the abbey would have been scattered.” Even keeping the book, letting alone revealing it, feels dangerous to Tilde. After hours of reading and deliberation, she hears Subprioress Goda coming to reprimand her for missing services and, in a moment of “thoughtless panic,” she tosses the book into the fire.

Here the omniscient narrator we’ve encountered at many significant moments in the novel steps in again, bringing us forward into our present moment so we can feel the significance of this loss:

As readers, we recognize that we are the ravenous people living in the hot world. The shock of seeing ourselves named in a novel set in this faraway time closes the distance, making us want to reach back in time and rescue Marie’s visions from the fire to help us build a different kind of future. Marie’s death concludes the plot; the job of this passage is to make the plot continue to resonate after we close the book.

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