Tag Archive for: endings

In praise of novels without neat conclusions

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Here’s a great article in today’s Guardian Books Blog by Lee Rourke. I couldn’t agree more and I love novels with fractured narratives.
Here’s one point that Lee makes that I particularly like:

Life isn’t like the narratives that make up the majority of novels in circulation today, or like the well-rehearsed scenes we enjoy at the theatre, or in the movies. It’s more complicated than that: steeped in confusion, dead ends, blank spaces and broken fragments. It’s baffling at times, annoying and perpetually open-ended. We have no real way of predicting our future. So why do our novels have to tie all this stuff together, into a neatly packaged bundle of ready-made answers? Something doesn’t ring true.

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