Sample Endings and Frank Kermode The Sense of an Ending

the ending of Shooters

by Paul Andrew E. Smith

Cadillac and Fender and Coca-Cola will always be the names against which all others in their respective classes are measured, but, as the open road closes behind me like the zipper on the blue jeans of my satisfied and love-worn Mexicali princess one last time before she made her way from my hotel room in the dead of night back to her husband's restaurant, her Roman nose silhouetted against the full moon, I know that the standard-bearer of agave nectars has yet to be named and am satisfied that I came close to giving that name myself.

the ending of The Monday Morning Bank Job

by Frank Edmund Smith

So, we got away clean and could be living anywhere now. Why Carmela's hot to move to the suburbs I'll never figure. But, I do what I'm told. After all, she planned the job and it went off perfect, except for that weird thing when she sort of turned green and blew chunks all over the bank guard. She wasn't hung over or anything since, another weird thing, she'd stopped drinking.

But, here I am, buying her evening dill pickle, wishing I could just rob this deli like in the old days, and wondering why she insisted that we put so much of the loot in an "Education Fund."

I mean, we're both already as smart as we're going to get. I know I am.

Who Was Frank Kermode? What Is The Sense of an Ending?

On his recent death (August 17, 2010) at 90 Frank Kermode received tributes from literary people of all persuasions: academics, literary theory and criticism specialists, and general good readers of literary writing. Even Time magazine recorded his passing. An expert on Shakespeare and Donne, he did not limit his reading to one time or type of literature; he was equally competent and valued for his analysis and reviews of contemporary writers. He simply enjoyed reading and revealing to others the nuances he found in books. Unlike some leading critics of his time, he argued for the primacy of the literary text over the commentaries on it, a common sense approach that for many years was out of favor among academics. He both championed the introduction of French theory into English literary study and attacked its extremes of confusing writing and self-importance.

The Scent of an Ending™ Contest was not devised as some kind of tribute to Kermode. His work stands for itself, but how to resist the pun on his major work The Sense of an Ending or all the delightful possibilities that follow from that pun? In brief The Sense of an Ending is Kermode's meditation on endings of all kinds, but mostly those in fiction. He proposes that, because our experience of life is chaotic, we construct in our lives fictions of beginnings and endings. Fiction itself is a kind of escape and control for the indetermination of time. He was interested in the pull of the apocalyptic and the way people keep wanting to construct end times. In a kind of Jungian synchronicity the cover of the September 2010 Scientific American, which arrived almost on the day of Kermode's death, announces "the end." The magazine then goes on to look at a variety of endings, as understood by modern science.

Because we live in a time in which a great many people are actively wishing for an end to all things [this is nothing new in human history, by the way] and we actually have the means to bring that about [this is fairly new]; sane, informed, historically based thinking about endings is one of the best ways to keep us all alive.

Here are some links that will take you to commentaries about Frank Kermode. Cut and paste into your browser.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/7952711/Sir-Frank-Kermode.html

http://www.slate.com/id/2265191/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/aug/18/frank-kermode-dies-aged-90

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/books-obituaries/7952711/Sir-Frank-Kermode.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/20/opinion/20fri4.html?_r=1

http://www.richardwebster.net/kermode.html