How to end your story? Tricky. One dynamic and exciting way to do it is to make your end a beginning. How does that work, you ask?
The end-as-beginning is a brilliant way of leaving your audience with a jolt of energy.
There are 2 main types:
1. True end-as-beginning – this drives the reader forward into a future beyond the story. The protagonist looks toward a new adventure at the close of the action.
2. Cyclical (aka ‘tied’) ending – we end up where we began and time becomes mysteriously circular – sometimes fully so, sometimes the new cycle is an altered one.
Almost every superhero origin story belongs to the first type. Having discovered their powers and gone through a period of training and trial, they find themselves ready to emerge as the fully-fledged version of their hero-selves. This is the point at which the hero really begins their work as their superhero self.
The highest-grossing movie of all time (based on theatrical earnings) ends with a beginning: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). In fact, it’s a real eye-opener when you notice it! To achieve its effect, the movie is topped and tailed with near-identical images. In the beginning, Jake Sully’s voiceover tells us that the first images of a flyover of the planet Pandora are his recurring dream. Then, we see Sully’s eyes open. He is a paraplegic man on Earth – lost, down on his luck and in a bad place. Skip forward to the very last scene, and after all the epic action and drama, Sully is being permanently inserted into his Na’vi avatar body, and with the transfer over – you guessed it – Sully’s Na’vi face opens its eyes. He is awake! It’s the final image, after which… cut to black, roll credits. Symbolically, this is not just about Sully surviving and becoming one of the clan. It’s about ‘awakening’, and the subtle meaning of the image of eyes opening has been widely used across the centuries. Its resonance is virtually universal: awakening as spiritual awakening, liberation from old beliefs and certainties, from self-limiting ideas (Sully – and humanity – is lost and disconnected at the beginning). When ‘awakened’ we become aware of a wider universe and our significance within it. This fits with the personal themes of the story as well as the environmental themes. It’s a pop culture movie, sure, but it’s no surprise that it is so loved, and that so many people watch it over and over. This deeper theme, even if viewers aren’t conscious of it, speaks to a spiritual need within us all.
One of the most famous and successful movies of its time, The Matrix (the Wachowskis,1999) ends with a beginning. Having learnt about his enslavement in the Matrix, having been freed and trained, and having navigated scepticism and self-doubt over his potential identity as ‘the One’, Neo accepts his fate and realises his potential. He is the saviour; he is the One. In the final scene, he speaks into an old-school telephone, telling the heart of the machine: ‘I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin’. With a few more words about creating a world free of domination and control, he hangs up and demonstrates his god status by flying up and away from the city of illusion and oppressive ideology. The reason none of the sequels were successful – and couldn’t add anything interesting to the world of The Matrix – is because this first movie was perfect in both form and content, and nothing needed adding. In this moment of beginning, Neo – as exemplar and ideal of liberation – hands things over to the audience. You are invited to free yourself from your own personal Matrix. Neo was talking to us, really, not the machine. The story ends with a beginning that’s in our hands, a future that’s ours to forge.
In the world of fiction, Michael Ende’s beloved The Neverending Story (1979) is a bit of a hybrid – part true beginning, part cyclical. After discovering a magical book, Bastian embarks upon adventures in the magical world of Fantastica. He learns courage and wisdom through allegorical experiences that help him to resolve his fears. When he returns to the ordinary world, he is mature and unafraid. His relationship with his father is mended and he begins a bright future with new confidence. As for the magical book, we learn that The Neverending Story will be read by countless others, that it is at one and the same time the never-ending story of every individual life, and that the imagination is the realm in which all things can be confronted and mended. There is a strong meta-narrative element present, which touches on the power and uses of story, in particular the human need to continually make meaning for ourselves in order to understand and gain control over our sometimes overwhelming and overpowering experiences.
In the realm of high literature, two towering works stand out for their endings-as-beginnings. James Joyce’s dense – some would say impenetrable – final book, Finnegans Wake (1939) ends with a concluding sentence that is finished by the incomplete sentence at the very beginning. The last line reads: ‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the’ – and the first line reads: ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve to shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs’. Notice that the line is talking about cyclical motion, a ‘recirculation’ of rivers and oceans. The text itself enacts the motion of meaning-creation in an eternal loop, as we follow ‘a long the riverrun’ the vortex of language, ideas, and story.
Samuel Beckett began his career wanting to write just like Joyce. He soon ditched the omnicompetence of Joyce’s style, preferring a far bleaker, stripped-down style that explored humanity’s abjection and hopeless predicament. I know, I hear he was a bag of laughs! (seriously, he was known for his humour, though it did tend toward the sardonic). The Unnamable is the third in his famous trilogy of novels and has to be read to be believed.
A disembodied voice speak to us for well over a hundred pages. It has no body, no sense of where it is, it doesn’t know whether it’s alive or dead – all it knows is that it is speaking, and as it does it can’t avoid telling us stories. Often, they are broken parts of stories, returned to and revised, or abandoned for others. It is painful for the voice to speak, and all it wants to do is to stop and rest in silence. Over and over, it tells us it’s about to stop, that it’s found a way to ‘say’ something definitively, whereupon it will have earned the right to stop. It will have meant something, and a satisfying silence can begin. But that moment never arrives, and with an enormous effort, the voice begins another attempt to talk its way toward an ending. Of course, every book must end, and so Beckett ends with the famous lines: ‘I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words… until they find me, until they say me… perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story… you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.’ The book ends, yes, but with the strong implication that all we have done, as readers, is to leave the voice where it is as it carries on ad infinitum. It’s still there, after we put the book down, making its attempt to speak something solid and lasting. It may be that, like Joyce’s book, the voice begins again at the beginning of the book, asking itself ‘Where now? Who now?’ and telling itself to ‘Keep going’. This is either a refusal to deliver an ending, or another cyclical ending-as-beginning. You might call it an ending-as-continuation.
It's worth adding that, although the end-as-beginning is a dynamic way to end, your story must stand on its own terms and work as a story. It must do all the things that a satisfying story needs to do for it to be engaging and satisfying before we reach this end. If you’re in the realm of high literature or arthouse film, then the following applies less, but for every other kind of storytelling, all the character arcs, protagonist-antagonist conflicts, journeys and missions, set-ups and pay-offs must be in place.
The end-as-beginning acts as a kind of addendum to the main story – once the essential elements of the narrative have been resolved, then the end-as-beginning offers a final jolt or zing that leaves the reader with a refreshing sense of energy and renewal. Ah, at the end of this journey a new beginning is coming to life! If it is a true beginning, then the protagonist will be setting out from a different vantage point after the preceding adventure; if it is a cyclical ending, then we are sent back to the beginning and are given a sense of endless recurrence.
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