How Does Appointment In Samarra End?

There's a little chill I get when a story nails inevitability — and 'Appointment in Samarra' does it so neatly it sticks in your chest. The short parable most people mean when they ask this is the one about a trader and his servant. The servant runs into Death in Baghdad and, terrified, bolts back to his master. The master sends the servant away to Samarra to escape Death, thinking he's cleverly outwitted fate. Later that night the trader sees someone in the marketplace and realizes it was Death all along; Death smiles and says, essentially, that the meeting in Samarra was the one he'd scheduled. It's blunt, swift, and perfectly circular: the servant's attempt to escape is the very motion that fulfills his doom.

I read that story on a rainy afternoon while drinking bad coffee and annotating the margins like an overenthusiastic grad student, and I love how compact and theatrical it feels — like a stage direction wrapped in doom. The power is in the economy: nothing melodramatic, no long moralizing passages, just a human trying to run from what is already arranged. That crisp inevitability is why the parable gets tacked onto so many works as an epigraph or a lens.

If you're asking about the novel titled 'Appointment in Samarra' by John O'Hara, the connection is thematic rather than literal. The novel borrows that sense of inescapable downward motion: the protagonist's choices and social missteps accumulate until there's a kind of moral or social death, a ruin that feels as predetermined as the servant's fate. O'Hara's ending doesn't read like a tidy parable — it's messier, social and psychological, and it leaves you with that hollow feeling of watching someone speed toward a cliff while their friends look away. So whether you're thinking of the parable or the novel, the closing image is the same kind of cold truth: sometimes the frantic motion to avoid a future is what brings it about, and that realization is what lingers with me long after I close the book.

If you mean the classic parable often called 'Appointment in Samarra,' it finishes on a dark, elegant twist. A merchant's servant meets Death in Baghdad, panics, and flees to Samarra to escape him. Later the merchant sees Death and asks why Death frightened his servant, and Death replies that he was simply surprised to see the servant in Baghdad because he had an appointment with him that night in Samarra. In short: the servant's flight is the very thing that leads him to the scheduled meeting. I love how tight that punchline is — it makes the theme of inevitability feel immediate and almost theatrical, like a trap snapped shut the moment the servant tries to run.