![]() (Crane) The men could have decided that the captain was unwanted baggage and instated tossed him into the sea. ![]() They can also be said to love each other since they remain with “the injured captain, lying in the bow”. To the four men, sticking together is the ingredient that keeps them alive. In The Open Boat, we see commitment among the four men stuck in the sea. Finally, John finds out about the secret affair and kills the two of them before killing himself. Mary begins an affair with James whom she views to be in her own league. (Atwood) The lack of commitment is seen in part C of Happy Endings when Mary abandons John because of his old age. We are told, “The rest of the story is about how kind and understanding they both are until Fred dies”. This commitment can also be found in part E of Happy Endings when Madge learns that Fred has a bad heart. The narrative tells us “they go on fun vacations together” (Atwood) meaning that there is a commitment between them. In part one of Happy Endings, both John and Mary are committed to each other. By looking at both narratives, we find people who are on the verge of giving up but their love, commitment, respect for each other, and hope keep them going to a point where they experience happy conclusions. Although both narratives are in different settings, they have many similarities between them. The situation the men find themselves in makes them create a love for each other. The narrative speaks of a strong will to live and shows how we are not supposed to give up. On the other hand, The Open Boat is a short story by Stephen Crane that explains about four men who are stuck in the middle of the sea while trying to find their way into shore after their ship has capsized. The rest of the narrative is filled with people’s desire to be loved. Although both of them die, they die happy people. In fact, the only happy ending is found in the first part of the story where John and Mary live their life to the fullest. According to the author, marriages do not always end in happiness. In the last analysis, ‘Happy Endings’ is a kind of postmodern story about stories: postmodern because it freely and self-consciously announces itself as metafiction, as being more interested in how stories work than in telling a story itself.īut within the narratives Atwood presents to us, she also addresses some of the inequalities between men and women, and exposes how relationships are rarely a level playing field for the two sexes.Happy Endings is a narrative by Margaret Atwood that explains the nature of marriages in society. A woman motorcycling across America on her own would not feel as safe, for one, as a man doing so.) (It is not that she isn’t free herself – she is, after all, carrying on an affair with a married, older man even though society wouldn’t exactly view that kindly – but her freedoms are of a different kind. Relationships are not equal in a society where men have things easier than women, and the third of Atwood’s six scenarios, in which Mary is the key player, makes this point plainly.įreedom, Atwood tells us, isn’t the same for girls as it is for boys, and while James is off on his motorcycle, she is forced by societal expectations to do other things. Of course, as so often in Margaret Atwood’s fiction, there’s a feminist angle to all this. ![]() Character motivation is more important than what they do or what is done to them. After all, do they? Perhaps the more important details are, as the closing paragraphs of ‘Happy Endings’ have it, not What but How and Why. By the time we get to the fifth plot, ‘E’, the narrator is happily encouraging us to view the plot details as interchangeable between Fred and Madge, as if they don’t really matter. Boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, and after various rocky patches they end up living, in the immortal words, ‘happily ever after’.Ītwood wants to put such plot lines under the microscope, as it were, and subject them to closer scrutiny. It’s a commonplace that happy endings in romantic novels ‘sell’: it gives readers what they want. Why does Atwood do this? Partly, one suspects, because she wishes to interrogate both the nature of romantic plots in fiction and readers’ attitudes towards them. But as the story develops, the author breaks in on her characters more and more, ‘breaking the fourth wall’ to remind us that they are mere ciphers and that the things being described do not exist outside of the author’s own head (and the reader’s: Atwood’s fiction, and especially the short pieces contained in Murder in the Dark, are about how we as readers imagine those words on the page and make them come alive, too).
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