You can't write the last scene.
You sailed through the climax, then stalled in the final pages. Happy ending? Sad ending? Finally, you type "The sun sank below the horizon" and groan.
"Isn't the ending where you answer the story's theme?"
Hold on. Does an ending really have to deliver an answer?
Today's book is Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye (1928). It gives a remarkably clean answer to the question of where to cut a story: line up a series of objects, and end the moment the last one is used up.
There are three keys:
- The eye that won't close
- The series that gets used up
- The abrupt ending
Let's take them in order.
(Spoilers ahead.)
A Dead Girl's Eye Looks Back at the Narrator
First, the bare bones of the book.
The narrator is an unnamed "I." He and two girls, Simone and the shy Marcelle, sink deeper and deeper into forbidden games. Eventually Marcelle breaks down and takes her own life.
The book includes this detail: even when Marcelle's face is wet, her eyes, strangely, won't close. More than anything, it's those eyes that irritate Simone.
Creepy, right? And that eye that wouldn't close comes back at the end of the story.
The setting is Seville, Spain. As the trio's acts reach their extreme, a priest's eye is cut out. When that eye is placed inside Simone's body, the narrator sees "Marcelle's blue eye" in it, brimming with something like tears and looking back at him.
Marcelle, who's supposed to be dead, has returned for the ending as nothing but a gaze.
So what's this doing? It tells you, in the final moment, that what happened in Spain isn't a separate adventure cut off from what happened in France. It was all one "story of the eye." The story draws a circle and closes.
In a 2014 paper, the critic Chris Vanderwees reads this scene as the uncanny return of Marcelle's shameful gaze.
The "I" Who Watched Becomes the One Being Watched
Vanderwees argues that because the first-person narrator has no name, readers can easily step into his shoes. From a safe distance, they get to experience forbidden things.
Before they know it, readers have become voyeurs. But there are moments when that privilege breaks down.
The first is the scene beside Marcelle's body. Another scholar, McWhorter, points out that this is the first time one body actually covers another, so the reader-voyeur's view is blocked. Vanderwees picks this up and reads it as the novel's first challenge to the male gaze.
The second is that final scene. The eye that was supposed to be doing the watching looks back. According to Vanderwees, this is where the reader's voyeuristic pleasure is cut off and turned inside out.
That's the critics' reading. The craft lesson, though, is simple: let your unnamed narrator do all the looking, then make something look back at the very end. That alone is enough to pull the rug out from under your reader.
The Plot Fizzles, but the Structure Is Complete
Here's the most interesting part.
Right after the final scene, the three flee their pursuers to Gibraltar, get a yacht, and set off on "new adventures."
Wait, that's it?
Yep, that's it. No punishment, no repentance. Judged by plot alone, it's almost absurdly anticlimactic. Yet when you close the book, it somehow feels finished. So what's going on?
The answer comes from the writer and critic Susan Sontag. In her 1967 essay "The Pornographic Imagination" (Partisan Review, vol. 34, no. 2), she says pornography has a perennial formal problem, the ending, and that Bataille "has offered distinctly original and effective solutions" to it.
Here's the solution. In this book, a series of objects, arranged in a definite sequence, are used one by one until they're used up. "When the last object (the eye) is used up in a transgression more daring than any preceding, the narrative ends."
Sontag adds that the egg in the first chapter is simply the first version of the eyeball plucked out in the last. The story holds no new "knowledge" and no surprises, she says, only intensifications of what's already known.
It starts with an egg and ends with an eye. In other words, what decides the ending is:
- not that desire was satisfied,
- not that a villain was punished,
- but that the last item in the series was used up.
By "series," I mean a chain of similarly shaped objects that appear in order, changing form a little each time. In Story of the Eye, it goes like this:
- First, an egg
- In Spain, a bull's testicles from the bullfight
- Finally, a gouged-out eye
So the departure for Gibraltar may fizzle as plot, but as structure it's already complete. The last item had burned out long before.
An Abrupt Ending Isn't a Flaw
"Still, doesn't a sudden ending look lazy?"
That's a fair worry. But Sontag sees it differently. She writes that an abrupt ending, unmotivated by the standards of a conventional novel, isn't necessarily objectionable. Abruptness isn't "some unfortunate defect" to be removed; it's part of the very way this kind of imagination sees the world.
The ending of Story of the Eye works on two levels. Inside the story, the eye returns and the circle closes. Outside, the plot is left wide open by the departure.
The inside snaps shut. The outside stays open.
The book also has a second part, where the author writes about how the story connects to his own upbringing. After cutting the story off cleanly, he steps out from behind it and annotates it himself. The way it ends is nothing like an ordinary novel.
So let me ask you. Are you stuck on your ending because you can't find the answer?
Maybe what's missing isn't an answer at all. Maybe it's the thing you use up last.
Four Steps to Try on Your Manuscript Tonight
"So what do I actually do with my own manuscript?"
Here's where it counts. You don't need to copy the book's extremity. Just steal the skeleton.
Step 1: List the things that keep coming back
Skim your manuscript and list every object or gesture that appears more than once: a cup, a clock, rain, a letter. Anything works.
Step 2: Arrange them into a series
Pick three to five and order them so they get heavier as they go. In Story of the Eye, it's egg → testicles → eye. In your story, maybe it's "a borrowed umbrella → a paper fan → the other person's hand."
Step 3: Use up the last one in your boldest scene
In the most daring scene of your story, break that last item, give it up, or burn it. Then try cutting the story right after it's used up. You can delete whatever explanation or epilogue follows, at least for now.
Step 4: Let what never closed in the middle look back at the end
Find a scene in the middle where something was left unfinished: an eye that won't close, a letter that never arrived, a question nobody answered. Bring it back in a different form at the end, right in front of your protagonist. This time, write it so the protagonist is the one being watched.
So, what do you think? An ending doesn't have to be where you deliver the answer. It can be where you use up the last item.
Think of it that way, and the line you couldn't write might suddenly come into view. Your manuscript, too, almost certainly has an "eye" you haven't used up yet.