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Conflict is the engine that drives compelling stories.
“Happy Endings” is a brief work of metafiction that considers how stories work. The narrator’s first advice to readers is to “try A” if they want to read a story with a happy ending. Readers quickly discover that variation A is tame and ultimately boring because everything goes right. This variation’s beginning promises a story about love, and it ends (as the narrator insists all stories must) with the characters’ deaths. But while variation A’s plot could go in many directions, it goes nowhere because no conflict exists and thus no satisfying resolution occurs. The narrator deems it necessary to inform readers that the story is over.
By contrast, the more interesting story variations include conflict that generates suspense about the story’s outcome. In variations B, C, and perhaps F (though that variation doesn’t move much beyond the opening premise), conflicts are generated because characters have opposing desires and because characters’ behaviors are conditioned and in some cases limited by their culture. John loves Mary, but she doesn’t love him. Mary loves John and thinks she can earn his love by certain behaviors. James cares more about music and the road than about Mary, and so on.
Other conflicts are generated by forces outside characters’ control. Fred and Madge, in variation D, lose their home to a tidal wave that kills thousands. Their survival transforms them into a more “virtuous” couple, but their love does not preclude the force that generates conflict in variation E, either Fred’s heart failure, which brings the couple closer, or Madge’s cancer, which leaves Fred “guilty and confused.” Though both “Fred and Madge” stories eventually lead back to the frictionless variation A, they get there through conflicts that prompt readers to wonder what will happen next and, more importantly, how characters will react.
The gender dynamics of relationships often work for men and against women.
Atwood’s works often explore gender dynamics in great depth. The main purpose of “Happy Endings” is to explore the nature of stories. Nevertheless, the narrator uses stories of men and women seeking love to comment on the process of crafting fiction. Stories in which people work out the consequences of their feelings are among the most commonly told. However, Atwood has spent her career as a writer and a political advocate addressing issues of feminism, so the choice to use these stories deserves attention. The story variations that involve Mary in conflict present a woman who is limited in how she can exercise agency. John easily leverages his dominance to harm Mary.
Mary would seem to have least agency in variation B. Mary tries to please John by behaving as she has learned men want women to behave. She cooks, makes herself up, demonstrates her worthiness as a housekeeper, and pretends to enjoy sex. She can’t bring herself to question her belief that her self-destructive actions must finally, surely earn John’s love. Instead, he takes what she offers without consequence until he moves on with Madge. In variation C, Mary is a self-sufficient working woman and would seem to have greater agency. But as the narrator drily comments, “Freedom isn’t the same” for women, and Mary is stuck waiting for the man she loves. When James finally does respond to her, readers might think that her waiting has paid off. But in fact, because John has a gun and feels betrayed, Mary dies in this variation as well. As the narrator says, all characters die, but Mary’s deaths are not of old age after a long, “stimulating” life, as in the conflict-free variation A. They result from John’s abuse in variation B and by his anger in variation C.
Compelling writers focus on how and why more than on what.
“Happy Endings” includes story variations—brief vignettes of varying levels of interest—that allow the narrator to comment on the craft of fiction. It can also be read as a miniature “master class” in how to write fiction. The narrator addresses would-be fiction writers directly, offering thoughts on how stories work, to make three claims.
First is that starting stories is “more fun” than ending them. Beginnings are open-ended and allow for endless possibilities. By comparison, endings are more constrained, as the narrator’s second claim asserts. The “only authentic ending” is that the characters die. How they die, and whether they die during the story’s action or at some imagined future fictional point, is up to writers. “Happy Endings” offers death by old age, illness, tidal wave, suicide, and murder as possibilities. The narrator calls any ending that avoids the fact of death “fake” but concedes that writers don’t always write inauthentic endings out of “malicious intent.” Self-delusion, overly sunny perspectives, and “downright sentimentality” can lead writers astray.
The narrator’s third claim is that not much needs to be said about plot because plot events are just “a what and a what and a what.” Plots are made up of events strung together in some plausible fashion. The events can be uniformly happy, as in variation A, or they can be tragic (the suicides, murders, and drownings in B, C, and D). Writers can arrange events in endless combinations. But plot alone is not story, as variation A demonstrates. It’s more like life, “just one thing after another,” which readers already know because they live it. Story is shaped and crafted, and what guides its form is not what happens but how and why characters behave as they do, sending the plot in directions that readers find engaging and relatable.
