![]() ![]() "Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on." Says it all, really. "I lingered round them, under that benign sky watched the moths fl uttering among the heath, and hare-bells listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth." More ending in death, but this time it sounds like a solace after life. "'Like a dog!' he said, it was as if the shame of it must outlive him." In German, it is even more terrible. 'What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died That she was beautiful. As a knife twists in his heart, Josef K realises that it is the victim who is ashamed, not the perpetrator. The ultimate finality, the moment of the protagonist's death. Endless ink has been spent explaining what Voltaire was "saying". Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville 'Ah Bartleby Ah humanity' Why It Works: Although Bartleby, the Scrivener is actually a short story, its last line is one of my favorites.Many people would list the last line of Melvilles Moby Dick here, but I love the simplicity of Bartlebys closing words. "'Cela est bien dit,' répondit Candide, 'mais il faut cultiver notre jardin'." After everything absurd and horrific that they have seen, after travelling the globe to witness the extremes of human folly and cruelty, Candide recommends a little horticulture. We must wander into French for one of the most discussed final sayings in fiction. But the maid servant has got into the gap between beds, "So that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's -" In the night, the curtain dividing the room begins to come unpinned, and Yorick reaches out from his bed. Yorick, the clergyman narrator, is sharing the only spare room in a French inn with a lady and her fille de chambe. The best comic last sentence ever is a perfectly suggestive interruption. ![]() "But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." Long, wordy, sententious: but Dorothea's obituary is weirdly moving nonetheless. If you haven't read the novel, it is banal if you have read the novel, you'll know how eloquently desolate this is. "I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be." A more recent example of the ending where the weight is in what is not said. The narrator's lover has died in childbirth and the only possible conclusion is one of those perfect Hemingway sentences, expressively drained of expressiveness. "After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain." At the end of this novel of love and war, hope and desperation, all passion is spent. Winston Smith's fate is not just to be defeated, but to have his will turned to submission. This is the terrible one because, by the time you get to it, you realise how inevitable it is. ![]()
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