I’ve just finished reading The Grapes of Wrath, which I had picked up years ago on a flea market (one of the many “might-as-well-read-this books” that I buy second-hand) and ended up liking it quite a bit more than I expected. I didn’t love it, found it a bit preachy and black-and-white, but still : a fine book and a very vivid picture of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression era.
But that ending. WTF ? I think I get what Steinbeck was aiming for but it was still unexpected, borderline gratuituous and… well, really weird.
When I saw the thread title I thought, ooh, i’ll Be the first to mention The Grapes of Wrath! But of course it was the reason the OP was posting.
But though the ending was widely derided at the time, I didn’t think it was all that WTF— it’s about life going on though tragedy, finding a way.
Everybody should read GOW, but for those curious as to what the ending is:
a young pregnant “Okie” woman in the 30’s has a stillborn baby due to malnutrition and poor prenatal care, so she uses her breastmilk to nurse a starving man.
a young pregnant “Okie” woman in the 30’s has a stillborn baby due to malnutrition and poor prenatal care, so she uses her breastmilk to nurse a starving man.
And these are the very last lines…
The last paragraph is tonally completely different from the 400+ pages that preceded it in every respect and… just brutal in it’s out-of-the-blue weirdness.
Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy might be stretching the definition of “classic,” but it’s over 50 years old and his books are destined to be classics, so I’m going with it.
The entire novel is already WTF, with the main plot of a brother and sister in Appalachia who have a baby together. The brother abandons the baby in the woods after birth, telling his sister it died in childbirth, and the sister eventually learns the truth and goes in search of it.
After plenty of disturbing and WTF events, it ends with
the baby being eaten alive by a trio of murderers, who are either real men, manifestations of biblical reapers, or a projection of the brother himself. This is followed by the brother talking to blind man, then watching the man walk into a swamp where he will surely die, and the brother thinking “someone should tell a blind man about a swamp before sending him that way.”
Like each of his three novels, Franz Kafka’s “Das Schloss” (“The Castle”) is a fragment, and famously ends mid sentence:
We will never know what she said, as well as what became of K.'s troubles with the monstrous bureaucracy of the castle, but somehow this abrupt ending fits the nightmarish air of the novel, indicating a neverending horror by chance.
I’d pick The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When Tom Sawyer shows up near the end and starts making ridiculous escape plans for Jim, the whole story shifts from an American tragedy to a bad comical farce.
High school story regarding Brave New World. I had a class called Utopia, where we read books based on utopias or anti-utopias. We were up to Brave New World, which I had actually already read. One guy was sitting in the back of class goofing off a bit. The teacher asked him if he had finished the book. He said that he had. She asked how it ended. He said the main character had steel toed boots on and was acting like a compass. The teacher and myself were the only two who laughed at that, since nobody else had completed the book.
This is the one I was going to mention. I’ve seen some scholars claim that the ending is just misunderstood. But I feel that Twain just had a bad day and botched it.
Twain was parodying other novels of the time where the hero had a convoluted plan to achieve his goal. I believe the target of the satire was Sir Walter Scott, who is name-checked.
The parody goes on too long, and since no one reads Scott these days, it’s not funny because you don’t know the source.
Are you attempting to find a motive in this narrative, a moral in it, or a plot? You should be prosecuted, banished, or shot. :dubious:
I read the ending to GOW the same as** solost**. Life sucks, it goes on anyway, and you do what you have to. Think of it as existentialist.
The king of WTF ending was Charles Dickens. He wrote Great Expectations as a serial, chapter by chapter. When he ended it with Pip and Estella not living happily ever after, reader were outraged, so he tacked on a new chapter with a happy ending.
Just like Twain parodied other ‘literary’ forms earlier, with the depressive girl writing horrible poems about dead birds and people falling down wells.
They got him out,
And emptied him. Alas, it was too late.
His soul had gone for to sport aloft,
In the realms of the good and great.
I think the idea of the ending is to show that Huck is now back in ‘sivilization’, not on the river. On the river he has learned that Jim has feelings, and Huck becomes more of a man. Once he returns to the small town, Tom, who is still a child, pulls him back into fantasy with no regard for Jim’s feelings. Tom withholds that Jim was set free, just for the sake of a fantasy.
Then at the end of the novel, Huck rejects civilization and its imposed fantasies, to head out for the wilderness where he can be a man again.
It’s still the weakest part of a great novel.
My WTF ending to a good/great novel is The African Queen, which is thoroughly anti-climatic. After all that risk and effort, and falling in love, it just peters out. Then a ship shows up out of the blue and blows up the Germans. Uh, okay.
Regards,
Shodan
I always thought Tom Joad’s “Where there is injustice, I’ll be there,” speech was a lot weirder than the breastfeeding. It’s the great, epic story of the American dustbowl and economic migrants, and then right at the end he starts talking like he’s Batman.
When I heard that Disney was making their version of The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I prayed that they wouldn’t change the ending to make it more kid friendly. Sadly, the ending from the book didn’t meet the standard of cute, happy endings.
When Quasimodo sees the gypsies, he assumes they are there to hurt Esmeralda, so he drives them off. Likewise, he thinks the king’s men want to rescue her, and tries to help them find her. She is rescued by Frollo and Gringoire. But after yet another failed attempt to win her love, Frollo betrays Esmeralda by handing her to the troops and watches while she is being hanged. When Frollo laughs during Esmeralda’s hanging, Quasimodo pushes him from the height of Notre Dame to his death. Quasimodo goes to the cemetery, hugs Esmeralda’s body, and dies of starvation with her.
The odd thing is a high school student reading that part of Huckleberry Finn today would probably think the character was an early example of a goth teenage girl.