Unfinished Lives

I think I like novels better than short stories. Novels begin and end well. They start easy, get thick and difficult around the middle and finally conclude on a note you may or may not agree with. You become the character in the novel, you live and grow, fall in love, get hurt, face difficult situations, survive, or die. When you have read through from cover to cover, you are almost proud of the character you have been, and the life you have lived as the character in the book. If you are not proud of the character, then maybe you didn’t like the book; but that is something else. At the end of the novel, whether you liked it or not, you feel the satisfaction, or the dissatisfaction, of a life lived. Sometimes you feel tired and exhausted from all the action. You are happy, nevertheless, because you know how it ended.  (This is for readers like me who get so involved in the book that when I am forced to take a break from reading, I am almost a zombie. My body is in this world, but my heart is in another. If you are a detached reader, then it may not be so for you.)

But short stories are not that way. The ones we were made to read in school were okay; they were the kind that had endings. I don’t like the kind we pick up from libraries. Short-story collections. They are mostly, as a friend pointed out, "open-ended". I don’t like that open-endedness. They just hang in mid-air, or rather, that’s how they seem to me. I hate the feeling of short stories ending without really concluding. I hate to turn a page and find another story beginning when I am still not quite done with the one I was just reading. Here I am thinking that I am in the heart of the actual plot, it can’t get any thicker than this, and it must soon be resolved to a happy or sad ending. But, no. They are not so considerate. Right in the middle of something, it may be a thought or an incident, it’s over.

As a student of literature, more than anyone else, I must learn to appreciate this. I must be able to talk about the profundity and beauty of such a story, about it being a true work of art. Open-ended stories and plays belong to a completely different genre altogether, characterized by the one feature I hate the most in them – the feature of not having a proper ending. Literary kinds would give you numerous reasons why such stories end the way they do. Even as I type this, I am able to recollect some of those reasons from lectures attended in college a year or so ago. I do not question the wisdom of my professors, so I don’t, in the least, argue with the justifications proposed by these schools of literature. But then again, this has nothing to do with my background as a student of literature.

This is about me being a reader with a heightened sense of curiosity. Art or no art, I feel that the writer has the obligation to tell me how to get out of a maze he or she led me into; that I have the right to know what happens next, because I willingly stripped myself of my own identity and stepped into the life of a stranger the writer introduced me to. I have trusted the writer enough to completely intertwine my being with the one in the story. I am not merely a spectator of the character’s adventures, but I am the character myself. I have trusted the writer to decide who I am, what must happen to me, and how I must react to what the writer lets happen to my life in the story. But mid-way through my journey, I am abandoned with no way of finding my way out. As I turn the page, I no longer know what happens to me in that life, I must go figure. (Although you may argue that I needn’t have so willingly allowed myself to be led. But let’s argue about that later.) Sometimes I can’t help but feel that the writer started off intending to write a novel, made a good beginning, but soon got bored or lazy, or worse, ran out of ideas or inspiration to conclude the story.

This feeling of not knowing makes me want to tear through the pages of the book and go inside once again; trust me, I would have done that if it helped. I feel so helpless, so lost, and occasionally even bugged at my inability to know what my dear character did in conclusion. But there’s no time to stop and wonder. In the next page, I have a new character, a new avatar, a new life, waiting for me in another short story.

Strangely, despite all this complaining, I am currently devouring through Too Much Happiness, a book of short stories by Alice Munro. J