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Short Story Endings In Short Stories

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Closure and Endings found in Short Stories Every story must start somewhere, but not every story has to have a complete ending, or even a clear one. With the development of the short story, the variation between short story endings has gradually increased as time has gone on, like the difference between a final ending in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” However, the endings of some short stories also depend on the style of how the story is written, like Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds,” which is a part of a larger novel, and Kate Chopin’s “The Blind Man,” which is a new branch of short fiction writing called microfiction. The ending also comes about based on the subject matter found in the story. For example, Tan is a second-generation Chinese-American like her character, June, in “Two Kinds.” Cheever lived through the Great Depression, and his family went through a similar fall from grace like his character Neddy did in “The Swimmer.” They say to write what you know, and these authors come to their endings through their own experiences and the type of style that they write in. Flannery O’Connor was a writer on rented time. Confined to her house throughout the final days of her illness, critics theorize that she spent a good amount of time thinking about how her life was coming to a close. Andre Bleikasten, author of “Beginnings and Endings in Flannery O’Connor,” believes that the reason why many of her stories end with such a finality
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