# Totally Unexpected, Out-of-Left-Field Literary Endings
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [March 31, 2011, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668 "2011-03-31T19:20:23Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/1 "2011-03-31T19:20:23Z")
As I mentioned n the current “Whatcha Reading?” thread, I just finished Evelyn Waugh’s _ **A Handful of Dust.** _ It was a very funny portrait of upper class life in interwar Britain, and I enjoyed it immensely.
However… the ending to the novel came completely out of left field. This was truly a strange, “WTF???” ending that nobody who’d read the first 2/3 of the book could possibly see coming. Namely…
The cuckolded husband decides to chuck it all and go on an adventure in the jungles of South America. He nearly dies, and is rescued by a crazy old man who keeps him prisoner, forcing him to read Charles Dickens novels aloud, for the rest of his life.
Really, a\*\*\* Twilight Zone \*\*\*ending to what had been a witty, cynical comedy of manners.
What other books surprised the heck out of you with bizarre endings that didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the book?
Mind you, I’m not looking for mere twist endings. I’m not looking for unexpected killers in mystery novels, interestingly horrifying endings to a horror novel, or absurd endings in absurdly comical novels. Rater, I’m looking for endings that seem completely unrelated to anything that had happened earlier in the novel. Endings that leave you scratching your head and wondering, “Where did THAT come from?”
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### Author:  [@well\_he\_s\_back](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/well_he_s_back)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/2 "2011-03-31T19:35:10Z")
I agree with you so much about A Handful of Dust.
When I read LOTR as a jr high kid, Frodo’s ‘failure’ at the Crack of Doom through me for a loop. I was stunned. Reading back as adult, I see it completely differently, of course.
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### Author:  [@hogarth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/hogarth)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 8:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/3 "2011-03-31T20:23:05Z")
When I was a kid, I thought “Battlefield: Earth” was a pretty entertaining book, but the switch from “overthrow the alien overlords” plot to the “survive in the world of intergalactic banking” plot wasn’t something I saw coming!
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### Author:  [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 8:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/4 "2011-03-31T20:31:06Z")
John Gay’s 1728 play **The Beggar’s Opera** does this, pretty deliberately:
> [@](#):
>
> The narrator (the Beggar), notes that although in a properly moral ending Macheath and the other villains would be hanged, the audience demands a happy ending, and so Macheath is reprieved, and all are invited to a dance of celebration, to celebrate his wedding to Polly.
> **[The Beggar's Opera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beggar%27s_Opera)**
>
> The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera in three acts written in 1728 by John Gay with music arranged by Johann Christoph Pepusch. It is one of the watershed plays in Augustan drama and is the only example of the once thriving genre of satirical ballad opera to remain popular today. Ballad operas were satiric musical plays that used some of the conventions of opera, but without recitative. The lyrics of the airs in the piece are set to popular broadside ballads, opera arias, church hymns and folk...
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### Author:  [@Suburban\_Plankton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Suburban_Plankton)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 8:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/5 "2011-03-31T20:41:24Z")
_Atlas Shrugged_. I was reading novel about the collapse of society caused by the world’s ‘movers and shakers’ withdrawing due to increasingly draconian government interference in the free market. That was all well and good until the last couple chapters, when it suddenly turned into a science fiction novel.
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### Author:  [@Labrador\_Deceiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Labrador_Deceiver)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 8:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/6 "2011-03-31T20:51:49Z")
_A Man in Full_, by Tom Wolfe, was a great book. Then, the author decided he didn’t want to write anymore, and provided the reader with an incredibly bizarre ending for the main character.
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### Author:  [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/7 "2011-03-31T20:52:40Z")
> [@Suburban\_Plankton](#):
>
> _Atlas Shrugged_. I was reading novel about the collapse of society caused by the world’s ‘movers and shakers’ withdrawing due to increasingly draconian government interference in the free market. That was all well and good until the last couple chapters, when it suddenly turned into a science fiction novel.
With an endless political manifesto in the middle.
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### Author:  [@astorian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astorian)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 8:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/8 "2011-03-31T20:54:56Z")
> [@Labrador\_Deceiver](#):
>
> _A Man in Full_, by Tom Wolfe, was a great book. Then, the author decided he didn’t want to write anymore, and provided the reader with an incredibly bizarre ending for the main character.
I’d forgotten that one, but you’re right
Both of the main portagonists become avid Zeus-worshippers and apostles of Stoicism.
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### Author:  [@Zsofia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zsofia)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/9 "2011-03-31T21:39:01Z")
Well, Stephen King often does an “oh crap I have to end this book now” deal - for example, in _It_ it’s a giant alien spider, sort of? And there’s a turtle? or _The Stand_ the Hand of God?, although I guess neither are exactly as off the rails as you might be looking for. But neither fit what was going on in the book at all.
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### Author:  [@3\_20\_59\_or\_bust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/3_20_59_or_bust)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/10 "2011-03-31T22:03:34Z")
> [@Zsofia](#):
>
> Well, Stephen King often does an “oh crap I have to end this book now” deal - for example, in _It_ it’s a giant alien spider, sort of? And there’s a turtle? or _The Stand_ the Hand of God?, although I guess neither are exactly as off the rails as you might be looking for. But neither fit what was going on in the book at all.
Well, I don’t think The Stand ending really is all that out of character. There were a lot of supernatural things going on in that book.
It, on the other hand, well…he was taking a awesome amount of drugs. It’s the only way to explain his books during that period.
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### Author:  [@freckafree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/freckafree)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/11 "2011-03-31T22:23:00Z")
I thought Chris Bohjalian’s\* The Double Bind\* had the biggest “WTF??” cop-out ending I’ve ever encountered.
The protagonist didn’t escape the attack as described in the beginning of the book. She was actually brutally raped and mutilated, and the entirety of the plot turns out to be her psychotic reaction to that event.
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### Author:  [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 10:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/12 "2011-03-31T22:55:55Z")
A book I read many years ago in French class – and haven’t been able to track down – was titled “L’homme qui dort cent ans” (“The man who slept 100 years”\*) It’s overall a nice book about the alienation and difficulty of an American who travels into the future and is unable to adjust to the changes in society.
Then, out of the blue, in the final chapter, it’s revealed (without any foreshadowing) that in Australia, they still lived exactly the way it was in America the century before. So he moves to Australia and lives happily.
The ending was probably the worst I’ve ever seen in a book.
\*There is a novel from about the same time called **L’Homme qui dort** , but it’s much more philosophical; maybe the one I read was a parody of that.
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### Author:  [@The\_Man\_With\_The\_Golden\_Gun](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Man_With_The_Golden_Gun)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2011, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/13 "2011-03-31T23:52:07Z")
> [@Zsofia](#):
>
> Well, Stephen King often does an “oh crap I have to end this book now” deal - for example, in _It_ it’s a giant alien spider, sort of? And there’s a turtle?
I thought the part at the end where:
The boys all have a gangbang with Bev.
was a lot more left-field.
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### Author:  [@SeldomSeen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SeldomSeen)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2011, 12:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/14 "2011-04-01T00:29:12Z")
Maybe not quite a WTF? but definitely a surprise…
In Ken Kesey’s _Sometimes a Great Notion_ The reader traverses some 600 pages wondering if sensitive, intellectual Leland Stamper will manage to seduce his beautiful sister-in-law or whether his uber-tough big brother will beat him up and drag her back to his cave by the hair.
In the final chapter beautiful Vivian says “to hell with you both”, walks out on her family and her old life, meanwhile the two brothers bury the hatchet and figuratively go dancing off arm-in-arm to do battle with the wilderness and the logger’s union.
Not sure what point, if any, Kesey was trying to make (he was tripping when he wrote it), but it’s a darn fine novel anyway.
SS
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### Author:  [@SeldomSeen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SeldomSeen)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2011, 12:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/15 "2011-04-01T00:31:07Z")
> [@The\_Man\_With\_The\_Golden\_Gun](#):
>
> I thought the part at the end where:
>
> The boys all have a gangbang with Bev.
And they were only 11 years old!!:eek:
Surprised King wasn’t damned for writing child porn.
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### Author:  [@Nawth\_Chucka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nawth_Chucka)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2011, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/16 "2011-04-01T00:46:37Z")
> [@SeldomSeen](#):
>
> And they were only 11 years old!!:eek:
>
> Surprised King wasn’t damned for writing child porn.
My mom and I were reading the same copy of ‘It’ she got the year it came out, her at night and me the next day. She read that part and wouldn’t hand the book over to me the next day, told me to finish it when I was older. I snuck it back and finished it. That ending was disgusting and I wish I’d never read it, especially knowing my mom had just read it - yuck.
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### Author:  [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2011, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/17 "2011-04-01T04:04:47Z")
David Wingrove’s _Chung Kuo_ series, which was this science fiction series where the world is ruled by these seven Chinese warlords who are constantly jockeying for power. Some people criticized the book as anti-Chinese, but I don’t think it was. The series was extremely morally ambiguous…you had likeable and “good” characters do some horrible things, and really awful characters make tremendous altruistic sacrifices. The books dealt with themes like stability vs change, order vs freedom. and I found them engaging. Until I got to the last book.
In the last book, we find out that the character of Howard DeVore, who’s always sort of been the villain of the books…DeVore is this European banker who’s leading a resistance/terrorist movement against the Chinese warlords based partly on racism and partly on his desire to just liberate the world from the oppressive system of the warlords…we find out he’s an extradimensional alien spider creature who is responsible for almost all of the historical evils of mankind, who wants to rape people and then destroy all life on earth. He’s beaten and then we find out that the world set up throughout the series is just a simulation and not the “real” world, but all the characters in it are also characters in the real world (although they’re different people), and the book ends on a space colony in the real world, which had been set up by a colony ship in the imaginary world.
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### Author:  [@Tom\_Scud](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Scud)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2011, 4:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/18 "2011-04-01T04:26:25Z")
Been trying to think of one, and remembered _Darwinia_, by Robert Charles Wilson. The story starts in a world where the continent of Europe has been inexplicably replaced in the late 19th century (I think) with a continent on which the life has followed an entirely different evolutionary history. The first part of the story tracks an expedition from the US to explore this continent. Anyway, somewhere around halfway into the book, it is revealed that what caused the world to change suddenly is that
the whole world is some kind of computer simulation, and some Cthulhu-ish critters had switched the disks (sort of) for Europe in an effort to gain access to the real world. Or something.
Read to the end of the book out of inertia, but damn did that ever irritate me.
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### Author:  [@jackdavinci](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jackdavinci)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2011, 8:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/19 "2011-04-01T08:28:46Z")
> [@3\_20\_59\_or\_bust](#):
>
> Well, I don’t think The Stand ending really is all that out of character. There were a lot of supernatural things going on in that book.
>
> It, on the other hand, well…he was taking a awesome amount of drugs. It’s the only way to explain his books during that period.
The Stand relied too much on Dues ex Machina. If the Hand of God was going to intervene, it didn’t need a nuke, it could have intervened earlier.
OTOH Turtles are always welcome.
> [@RealityChuck](#):
>
> It’s overall a nice book about the alienation and difficulty of an American who travels into the future and is unable to adjust to the changes in society.
This reminds me an awful lot of Venus Pus X.
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### Author:  [@Sevastopol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevastopol)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2011, 10:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/totally-unexpected-out-of-left-field-literary-endings/576668/20 "2011-04-01T10:03:54Z")
_Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow_: studied and intricate novel of Denmark/Greenland colonialism and post-colonialism, digressions into sub-Arctic lifestyle. Driven by a crime thriller narrative and a kickass protagoniste.
Then: What? [No spoiler proffered]
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