IDT1415 CW Entry 17 - Endings

Can you apply any of Chekhov's 'subversive endings' to your story?

As Barb mentioned in her blog post, writing a powerful ending to a story is an art and would like to think that since practice makes perfect as they say, then I need a lot of practice! While reading Jauss' article I was happy to see that it is also possible to end a story with everything going back to normal or as it was before. And yet, I think that simple as it seems, achieving it is not as much for Chekhov's intricate work would in its simplicity add complexity by creating an unexpected ending which is what makes them 'subversive' in my opinion. I really like how Kolpakov, in the Chorus Girl, goes from being passive to fully emotional in the end, showing life, or what Jauss implies in his article, returning alive. I find these subversive endings exciting and fascinating as they do reflect real life as Jauss says. Also,  because as he also says they do 'undercut our expectations' and can see my story having a subversive ending which brings in a pinch of chaos to an end that seemed predictable. This would make it even more memorable, I'd say, but this is yet to be decided. 

As it is usual for me, I decided to created a table summarising Chekhov's Closure Strategies as they're called by Jauss as it will help me to keep the options at hand when working on my third draft.

Chekhov's Closure Strategies
1. Anti-epilogues	'he typically returns the character, and us, to the uncertainty of life, leaving us wondering what will happen next'. 'How will it end?' Grace >Paley: 'The open destiny of life'.
2. Reverse epilogues	There is a shift to the past when we expect a move to the future. It says what 'has happened' not what 'will happen', implying no future change as suggested by Frydman. Clear example in Pasha's ending where she is humiliated and one would expect she'd learnt her lesson and this to trigger change but instead Chekhov finishes by remembering her previous humiliation implying no future change.
3. Echo endings	Chekhov 'conveys the essential changelessness of those lives—... by echoing in the ending the events, imagery, and/or language of the story’s opening.' e.g. in A Strange Land he finishes with the sentence: 'The same performance begins over again, and Champoun's sufferings have no end'. In short, the story would end in the same way it began.
4. Chiastic endings	Are those where the ending repeats the words and/or actions of the opening in reverse order. 'Cathy Popkin compares such endings to the rhetorical device chiasmus, in which the order of words in two otherwise parallel phrases are reversed.  The example given in The House with the Mezzanine where Monsieur X describes in reverse order the path he walked when he initially approached Zhenya and how this represents
5. False climaxes	Where the conflict remains unresolved, the character ultimately unchanged. In 'Misery' Iona fails to find someone who will listen to his story and in the end he tells his story to his horse, which is a false climax as even if he finds an audience -the horse - it is not a real audience.
6. Omitted climaxes	Conrad Aitken: these stories which do not ... conclude at all - they merely stop.' However, conclusions are not premature. Conflict cannot be resolved. These are in Frydman's terms 'dead end stories'.
7. External climaxes	'An epiphany is more powerful if the reader experiences it rather than witnesses it'. He does it through an unreliable narrator e.g. The Little Joke, the narrator recounts a joke he claims not to understand but the readers do - that in reality he did lover her and missed one chance at love. He also does it through analogy: in 'Fortune' he compares the shepherds to the sheep and the implications of this analogy are an epiphany to the reader.
8. Temporary climaxes	Or 'relapse endings' show the protagonist back where they started. '... relapse plot is perhaps Chekhov’s most common solution to the conflict between the desire for narrative closure and his belief in the relative changelessness of human beings...'. In a Gentleman Friend, Vanda has an epiphany which does not last as she ends up in the same conflict (being a prostitute) at a club called 'Renaissance'. The Darling is an example of the relapse plot on steroids as there are repeated relapses as in a 'novella-like fashion'.
9. Complication-creating climaxes	In this type of ending characters do change without relapsing but this change makes things more difficult. In Neighbors, Pyotr's resolution to whip Vlassitch for seducing his sister Zina dwindles as the story progresses making the story more 'falling action' rather than 'rising action'.
10. Conflict-creating climaxes	Endings which resolve one conflict by creating a completely new one. In Sleepy, Varka strangles the baby (solves the conflict preventing her from sleeping), but knows that when she wakes up the new conflict awaits her: going to jail.
11. Extended anti-climaxes	The climax is given so early in the story that it becomes literally anticlimactic. In The Teacher of Literature, the story builds toward the conventional happy ending of a wedding, but then goes beyond it to the mundane disappointment that follows. In The Story of an Unknown Man Chekhov builds toward the narrator’s transformation into a new person very early in the story, but what happens next deflates that climax and extend the character’s anticlimactic return to the “small print” of life. This is one of Chekhov’s masterpieces. The climactic scene in Ward No. 6 sees the narrator ready to kill his enemy but fails. Then for 35 pages he focuses on the questions the protagonist's change raises.
12. Shifts in address, tense, and/or PoV	In The House with the Mezzanine the narrator changes from addressing the audience to his lots love Zhenya. In A Boring Story this happens too and there is also a change of tense to past tense revealing a sense of loss which was kept at bay by using the present to describe past events using the present. In Expensive Lessons the shift is to the present showing how the protagonist has failed to master French and chronicled everything in the past tense up to then. In a Trifle from Real Life Chekhov changes abriptly from Nikolai to Aliosha's PoV in the story's final sentence. The shift shows the story was about the child, Aliosha and not the adult, Nikolai. In Gusev, the PoV shifts from Gusev after his death to the sea creatures not other characters.

What's your experience of writing subversive endings?

Unfortunately, I have very little experience of writing subversive endings as this is the first time that I've come across them. I plan to use the table above to add one to my story, but I haven't decided yet which one it will be. I think they all have a different appeal and as Zac (2012) mentioned in his video, stories can cause different reactions to listener/reader - empathy being my preferred option over distress. 

References

Jauss, D., 2010. Returning Characters to Life: Chekhov's Subversive Endings. [online]. Last accessed 25               March 2015 at: http://www.writersdigest.com/jauss-article.

Zac, Paul., 2012. “Empathy, Neurochemistry, and the Dramatic Arc.”  [online]. Last accessed October 16 April 2015 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHeqQAKHh3M