Ta-dah

My last post was on films, today it’s my picks for the eight most memorable closing literary lines and what makes them special.

The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."    

Fitzgerald hypnotized successive generations of readers with this tale. Nick Carraway's signing off after the death of Gatsby is my favorite last line in the Anglo-American tradition – resonant, memorable and profound. It hovers between poetry and the vernacular and is the magnificent chord, which brings this 20th-century masterpiece to a close. Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, in tone as much as meaning, while giving the reader a way out into the drabber, duller world of everyday reality.

Ulysses by James Joyce

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Joyce is the master of the closing line and this is his most famous and most suggestive. Compare it with the end of The Dead, his short story that concludes Dubliners: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

Middlemarch by George Eliot

"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."

Middlemarch is many readers' favorite Eliot novel, with so many quotable passages. This passage is a lovely, celebration of Dorothea's quiet life, after she has renounced Casaubon's fortune and confessed her love for Ladislaw.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."

And she has. Lily's closing words complete the circle of consciousness. Virginia Woolf was good at last lines and was always a decisive closer. Mrs. Dalloway, whose first line famously has Woolf's protagonist buying the flowers herself, ends with: "It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was." That's the perfect conclusion, to a climax, nailed in nine words.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

Brontë's masterpiece is often cited for its gothic morbidity and intoxicating romantic darkness, but here – stepping back from the tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine – the novel displays an acute evocation of Yorkshire combined with memorable poetic grandeur. This note of redemption promises a better future in the union of Cathy and Hareton.

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better place that I go to than I have ever known.”

Sydney Carton spends much of the book as a brilliant but self-indulgent type.  He finally learns the true meaning of sacrifice as he offers his life in order to save that of the brave Charles Darnay, and he realizes that this sacrifice is the single best thing about him. In his final moments, he at last becomes worthy and he has no fear of death because his death means something. Dickens' words have been the symbol of self-sacrifice for centuries.

Emma by Jane Austen

"But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union."

Jane Austen can write one hell of a happy ending, can't she? The "deficiencies" she refers to are told from the perspective of the ceaselessly imperious Mrs. Elton, who complained of the small amount of white satin and lace: "a most pitiful business!" Romance and satire are never so beautifully interwoven as in a Jane Austen novel.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

"But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and civilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before

This last line captures Huck in two sentences: he can't be civilized. He's been there before and it simply didn't take. Huckleberry Finn must be free! It also presents a bit of optimism in the (often too strict) love that Aunt Sally offers the boy, who has had very little in the way of love his entire life. It's a sardonic note on a happy ending, which is vintage Twain. 

Less on endings more on Characterization: For those readers who are interested on Wednesday I’m a guest blogger on Janice Hardy’s The Other Side of the Story, in which I discuss—Who is in the title role?  Click on: http://blog.janicehardy.com/