payment page
Metafictional stories often avoid the common plot structure seen in many stories (exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution). Instead, writers take innovative and often playful approaches to structure that allow them not only to tell a story but to consider how stories work. In “Happy Endings,” the structure is conveniently labeled. The narrator acts as a guide through the six interlocking stories and provides commentary before, after, and even during the stories. This recursive structure allows the narrator to examine the process of storytelling and to comment on why stories succeed or fail.
The narrator’s often wry comments about structure suggest observations about the process of crafting fictional plots. The tepid, conflict-free variation A, for example, consists mostly of sentences that begin with the pronoun They and that blandly state something Mary and John do: “They buy a charming house.” The narrator announces, after these statements, “This is the end of the story,” as if the paragraph break and following label B. don’t make it clear that the first story variation is done. But because at three other points (in variations B, C, and D), the narrator refers readers back to variation A, “This is the end of the story” gets reiterated three times. Readers must “face it”: in every story, characters do something, then die, and that’s it. The recursiveness and matter-of-fact analysis of story structure reinforce the narrator’s claim about the basics of plot story, which is not, in the narrator’s opinion, where the genius of story lies. What drives characters to act, about which variation A says only “John and Mary fall in love,” is more interesting. By directing readers forward to each variation and then back to variation A, the narrator not only states but also demonstrates an observation about stories.
