That's All She Wrote

"What happened next?"

"I don't know, I wasn't there," I answered.

"But you told the story," he insisted.

"The teller does not have to know the future."

"It can't end like this,"

"It can end in any way.  Have you heard the phrase 'That's all she wrote", which dates back to the 1940s, and probably originated with the reaction to the "Dear John" letters that some American  G.I.s received while serving in Europe? And "The Story of Sir Thopas" told in the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer himself, appearing as a character in his own collection, is interrupted by the Host and doesn't end.

"Forgive me, Mr Chaucer. I must speak my mind. Your story is not worth a shit. What's the point of it? You are doing nothing but waste our time." 

(From " The Canterbury Tales, A Retelling by Peter Ackroyd", 2009, page 347.) 

"The story you've just told leaves us hanging.", he said, stubbornly hanging on to his complaint.

"When novels were printed in installments in popular press during the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, they often left the readers hanging to encourage them to buy the next day's edition of the newspaper.  One writer, I forget who, recalled ending a day's piece by having the hero jump out of an airplane without a parachute (it must have been a 20th century story then.)  The next day he lands safely, or else forgets the jump ever happened.  Didn't one of the heroes of the "Dallas" television series die, only to come back to life the next TV season,  his death explained as another character's season long dream? Yes, that was another famous screen shower scene (the "dead" character emerges from a shower and is seen by the other character just waking up from the dream.)  (Incidentally, the character's "death" was caused by a dispute over the actor's salary, which even in those days reached a million dollars per filmed episode, and was obviously later resolved.)  Didn't Sherlock Holmes once die and was later revived?

"I still want to know what happened next.  Did she call him or not?"  (He would not give up.)

"I don't know, I really don't.  But think a minute.   If she didn't call, and the storyteller knew it and told you, then the story told is about futility of it all, and not really worth telling.  If he (the storyteller) knew it and declined to tell you, then he's dishonest.  But if she did call, then another story started, a romance perhaps, and that story would be irrelevant to the story I told you. Or uninteresting, typical, tragic, maudlin, too long to tell, or anything at all. Or she called and another story was not started. A telephone call followed by nothing more."

"There must be a finale, a clincher, a capper, a punch line or a moral."

"Maybe in Aesop's Fables or in Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales, yes, but in life endings are rarely neat like wrappings on your Christmas gifts.  I recently finished reading a lengthy contemporary novel, which ends, you might say, neatly.  Still, if you read the reader reviews on Amazon, some are curious what happens to the main character afterwards.  Will there be a sequel?  Probably not, this is "serious" literature, not the Star Wars saga which only ends when the leading actors become too old, die or refuse to continue, and then "prequels" are made."

"Will there be a sequel to this story?"

"Nope! Maybe a prequel.  Read it again. Or better yet, read another story or novel that leaves you unsatisfied with the ending wishing you knew what happened next.  Then start backwards from that ending. Perhaps what you were looking for, the gist of it, the pearl, so to speak, the meaning, however profound or plain silly, was already within the story and you missed it. Some stories are like that. Some stories are not worth a shit."