How a Story Ends

A story’s end can change all that came before. That’s a lot of power.

This is obvious when the story has a moral. How does “The Little Red Hen” end? You can listen / read / watch these versions of “The Little Red Hen” to see some options.  

In Version 1: “The Little Red Hen” ( from short kids stories.com), the ending comes down on the side of justice over mercy: the other animals don’t help the little red hen so they don’t eat. . 

In Version 2: “The Little Red Hen” (from Scholastic Read Along on YouTube), the hen ends up with helpers for the future in this version. The focus is on teaching them to be helpful. It’s a hard lesson but the redemption softens it a bit.

Version 3: “The Little Red Hen” (from SuperSimple TV on YouTube) makes the moral even more explicit than the other versions, as if it weren’t obvious enough (!). The hen feeds her chicks in this one.

The basic story is the same here, but the conclusion varies. Sometimes the Little Red Hen eats everything herself. Sometimes she shares with her children. Sometimes the other animals are punished, potentially with the idea that they learn something and do better next time. It makes the lesson more gentle when the other animals have a chance to redeem themselves. It makes the hen less open to charges of selfishness when she shares with her children at the end.

What of a more complex story? I recently read Haruki Murikami’s Kafka on the Shore, and as I was reading, I was wondering what kind of ending he would go for. It clearly mattered, but because of the range of genres in play in the book (myth, Bildungsroman, fantasy, sci fi, literary character-based fiction), I figured Murakami had options. As I made my way through the book (with a couple of enforced breaks when I had to let the other reader of the library’s digital copy have it for a couple of weeks), I began to see how the story had to end. At some point, most of the major components of the forthcoming conclusion were inevitable, but that didn’t diminish my interest. And because it wasn’t clear quite what sort of book I was reading, even as I was quite close to the end, I wondered about a couple of key elements. Waiting for the end wasn’t what kept me going, though, and the way the end shaped the preceding story isn’t as obvious as it is in The Little Red Hen. Its impact may be more profound, though: a surprisingly uplifting conclusion isn’t what I expected when I first started Kafka on the Shore, and I like the arc it brings to the complete story.