Happy Endings

I find myself curiously in need of stories with happy endings. Not the ones that end with “they lived happily ever after” in saccharine fairy tale fashion along the lines of the scullery maid marrying the handsome prince. I’m thinking of the kind that does offer hope, that enlightens, or inspires in a regenerative way.

Typical plot resolutions include:

• The main character changes for the good through achievement of some self-awareness or improved fortunes.
• The main character stays the same and the status quo is preserved. (At least he doesn’t kill himself but lives unhappily ever after.
• The main character dies either of unnatural or natural causes.
• The author affords an ambiguous or open-ended conclusion, meaning the reader guesses at the character’s fate. I like to call this the stalemate ending.

There may be other types of endings, or variants of these basic models. In any event, no others come to my mind. The benefit of an open-ended conclusion of a story is that it leaves room to write a sequel.  Or another author decades later can seize the opportunity to write a novel-length epilogue for that story. In this day and age, I prefer the happy first alternative. I crave to see the characters experience some light at the end of the tunnel and emerge into the sunshine. Oh, well, Pollyanna me!

My burning need for happy endings perhaps arises from the wish to believe that most people do learn from their mistakes. Mistakes are correctable. The question is how many mistakes does an individual have to make before he corrects course. The story of a bumbling idiot who never learns from his mistakes would veer toward a comedy. However, I am not in the mood for a lot of slapstick laughs nowadays. I am too chapfallen at the reality of a buffoon elected to high office in the United States. Consequently, my optimistic hope persists that a portion of the American electorate will learn from that mistake.

Disregarding the reason on the national scene to wish for a happy ending, there are other reasons to esteem happy endings in fiction. They nourish the soul; they lighten the load; they brighten our path when in our personal life we feel too dismayed and disheartened to cling to the hope that ultimately even evil can work for the greater good of the individual soul and the world soul. In times like this, I cannot feed on distress and disaster. I have to gorge on stories of courage and endurance. I want stories in which truth prevails over lies. I crave to read of spiritual growth and self-awareness triumphing over vice and ignorance.  This is not entirely fantasyland, for in natural disasters people do rise to the occasion to help their neighbors, acting more courageously and unselfishly than they ever had before. In dark times I need to be uplifted and inspired, so I must turn to writers who hold up a beacon, ones that restore my belief that nobility still resides in human nature, that illustrates that a man has a spark of the divine as well as of Mephistopheles.

If it is true people do choose what they want to believe, then concomitantly they choose to read what supports those predispositions to believe this or that. However, with self-reflection they can also achieve some self-awareness to realize that they are catering to their inherent prejudices and then choose to exercise more dispassion. A core disposition I have is that we possess an internal autopilot that signals us to change course when we realize we have made a mistake. Those who choose to ignore the warning and stay on the same course will have an unhappy ending. Those who heed the flashing red light choose to have a happy ending.