![]() ![]() ![]() In the plot A, John loves and treats her wife, Mary with respect and love. John, who is one of the main characters of the short narrative, showcases different qualities in the different appearances in the plots to show the different traits that attribute masculinity. Consequently, the statement that the beginning is fun but the end is the same due to death as the inevitable variable forms the backbone of the plot of the story. The author, on the contrary, expresses solace in the report that the beginning of something is the most probable part of experiencing not only fun but also pleasure. However, the primary factor is that the end of the plots is similar but not the same (Greene). In the successive plots, the same characters marry but experience various hindrances towards happiness. Consequently, the first plot excludes the problems that encounter courtship. The reality subjects marriage to joy as well as problems. However, the narrative is too good to be true, and thus the construct differs from the reality. The marriage does not encounter any problems, and the stakeholders live happily ever after in their life. The first plot, plot A, gives the most sought after ending whereby there is a good start in courtship and a happy ending through a blissful marriage. The six plots of the story showcase different conclusions. The only things that matter are the circumstances that lead to that end. The author creates the impression that the end is the same. 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.Of A Literary Analysis of the Treatise, ‘Happy Ending’ By Margaret Atwood ‘Happy Endings’ is a short story that comprises of six different composite narratives creates a presentation that marriages have analogous problems that occur in different ways. 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). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |