Said By Brad

I was thinking the other day about some of my favourite books, and after musing for a while and flicking through a few of them, I began to see a common link; Most, if not all, had sad, depressing and rather gloomy endings. Sounds rather strange at first, but I believe happy endings.. are bad.. There must be a million books where ‘the guy gets the girl’, ‘the person recovers from their terminal illness’ etc. I don’t really read books for comfort or to feel good about myself or life in general. I read a book because I want a gripping and thrilling story line, happy endings seem to blight the former.

Now, a few examples:

1984
Classic book, story of one man’s struggle against a totalitarian goverment, when practically everybody else is brainwashed by it, Now in all fairness with the story the way it is (and anyone who’s read it will understand what I mean) it would be a little unrealistic if it did have a happy ending, and the one man managed to overturn an entire regime. The final paragraph is a literary masterpiece, and like everybody else he loses the fight against ‘big brother’.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed- exile frm the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

The Trial
This book is rather unique in the way that the actual plot is quite thin, but it still is a very compelling and enticing read. It’s basically about a rather normal man who one day wakes up to find himself ‘under arrest’ (although not ‘under arrest’ as we would imagine, he is still allowed to leave his house and attend work) long story, short; the book ends with two men who take him to a quarry and kill him, he goes with them because he has become so.. mentally distorted.. by the whole incident he is pretty much expecting to be executed. You never find out what he did wrong, and nor does he.

And to finish, A quote from the author of ‘The Trial’: Franz Kafka, pretty much sumarising my views on the point of ‘happy endings’.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? …we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

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