What Is The Ending Of Red Wind: A Collection Of Short Stories Explained?

It eschews heroism. It favors the flawed hero in contemporary stories, who may or may not even achieve something good in the end. The ending provided for Modern Stories is that of a deeply flawed hero who, within the limits of his humanity, did everything right, but ultimately achieved nothing. He was totally absorbed by the system into his work and his truth, without any change or impact whatsoever. This is the heroism of Hou Lei Xiao, entirely internal and invisible. He is a hero of knowing, of perpetually knowing even when it is bitter and useless. The ending provided for Modern Stories is the explained ending of this hero. His solitary monument to his knowing will be weathered by the wind in the end. It’s a stark, uncompromising vision.

A very pleasant ending to ‘Red Side Story’. Eddie and Jane of Earth, as usual, trying to outsmart the System. Just like the rest of us. No magical solutions here. And in the end it’s just so funny and strange and another commentary on our current reality. That final action by Jane is so tiny and powerful and Eddie’s fate, well, you can cheer or cry. The satire in the last few chapters is so powerful and the author does not resolve any of the knots that he created. He simply leaves them there for you to untangle.

‘Red Widow’ ends well. The show tackled the dark side of revenge throughout it, never providing easy resolutions to the problems that the characters encountered along the way. And it ends with consequences too. Although Marta managed to get her revenge by having Schiller arrested for his crimes, the show made it clear that her revenge was in no way satisfying. The greatest price that Marta paid for her revenge was that of her brother’s life – he had tried to protect her and in the end it was his life that was lost. The two children that Marta had been fighting to protect throughout the series were left traumatized by it all. And in the final scene of ‘Red Widow’ we see Marta alone at last – free at last but changed forever by all that she had been through. It’s all pretty bleak, but fitting for a show that has tackled things in this way throughout. There are no grand farewell speeches for the characters of ‘Red Widow’. Instead we see silence – and in the distance the sound of waves crashing against the shore. It’s far more powerful than any bloodbath.

I wanted to replay the last story, it circles back to the main point of the book: how communal memory can shape us, even as it is slipping away from us. And in the end, The Box Social is almost a character in the last stories, and the stories are so much better without it. But the ending as it is now is wonderful too, so wonderful that I feel like I have to go back to the beginning of the book and read it all again to realize how all the echoes in the stories that I had totally forgotten worked together in the end.

Cinderella is one of the most iconic happily-ever-afters of all time, with the heroine ditching her abusive family after the prince finds her with the help of the glass slipper. What makes it last is the satisfying emotional payoff of having a perfect and loving life with someone who values her. Of course, there are versions of Cinderella out there where the wicked stepsisters get their eyes pecked out by pigeons. But that’s not the main story. The main story is that goodness wins, and that’s really all we want from our stories. It’s very satisfying. There’s a collective sigh of relief as we watch Cinderella walk into her palace, knowing she’s found her true home with someone who loves her to pieces.

The title story is brilliant in leaving the princess’ decision to us, to save her lover or to condemn him to the tiger. The setup is so masterful in bringing out our biases towards love versus jealousy that you can easily decide to read the story from either angle. The rest of the stories in the collection are also very nice, my favorite has a fun shadow who is sentient. However, none of them have the same psychological weight as the title story, which is brilliant because it is so open to interpretation. In fact, it is just the kind of story that keeps alive in people’s minds as they keep reading the story over and over and decide it in different ways. It sparks endless debate.

I kind of wrote a really long analysis of the ending of The Prisoner on a fan forum. Basically, the cranes fly south, then north, then south again. The story starts with a protagonist who leaves a burned village, and ends with a protagonist who is founding a very small village. The last chapter of the book describes a landscape which mirrors the description of the landscape in the prologue, but with certain key differences that show growth through decay. Instead of a tree that was stricken by lightning being dead, it's now nourishing new moss. It's not a happy ending, but it's generative. The protagonist of the book becomes part of the ecosystem's cycle, rather than trying to conquer it. If you read it looking for plot resolution, you'll be confused. But if you read it as a tone poem about human resilience within the cycles of nature, it's really beautiful.

There’s ‘The Gift of the Magi’ by O. Henry. I read this in school long ago but I still get chills thinking about this particularly lovely short story about a young couple who each lose their most prized possessions in order to buy the perfect Christmas gift for the other. The moral, that love is greater than any material possession and that true gift-giving comes from selfless sacrifice, is powerfully conveyed through a beautiful story and perfect irony, leaving the reader with a very warm and bittersweet feeling long after finishing the story. One of my favorite short stories is 'The Lottery' by Shirley Jackson. Now this is a very different type of moral. At first the story seems to be this really fun little tradition that a small town celebrates every year but in reality it is a horrid look into the dangers of blind conformity and the dangers of traditions that are continue simply because they have always been done. It is a very shocking story and there is a very horrid twist at the end that really shocks you into realising just how blindly people follow along with things that are wrong and even be cruel. We read this in book club and it really brought out a lot of discussion. Some people found it to be very horrible while others saw it as okay. Again this is not a 'feel good' moral but it is a very powerful message that really makes you think. Another piece that I find uplifting is “The Last Leaf” by O. Henry. An artist struggles to make ends meet with his girlfriend sick in an apartment right below them. He paints a single leaf on a close-by tree in order for her to know that they still have hope. The story is so beautiful in its quiet portrayal of friendship and the power of art to sustain life. I love this short story because there is no moral at the end of it. The moral is embedded throughout the whole story in the way that the characters treat one another with kindness and beauty. Every time I read it, I find something new about the characters and their relationships. It never fails to bring a tear to my eye in the happiest of ways.

It’s a terrible, hollow, bitter kind of ending. And David has survived. But the cost of that survival is the worst kind of curse. The ending really drives home the point that the human capacity for hope is our greatest asset, but also our greatest tragedy. David hoped to spare the people he loves from suffering, but that hope was a hope based on giving up all hope of rescue. The irony is so thick you could cut it. King isn’t willing to let anyone off the hook, including the reader. We’re left to sit with the full weight of the terrible choice that David made, wondering if we would have done the same thing in the same circumstances. And the terrible answer is that there are no good choices here, just different terrible ones.

A friend of mine claims that later stories (from the early 2000s onwards) by Mastram tried to incorporate more of a plot and an even darker ending. He’s talking about stories and scenes of betrayal, blackmail and even a few murders. Apparently, Mastram tried to change the tone of his stories to make them more comparable to the typical crime thriller. I haven’t been able to track down and read these stories myself, but it would be interesting to see how they developed. Maybe the ending of a Mastram story changed from simple satisfaction to something darker and more complex. Or perhaps even the ending of a Mastram-style story was meant to change. Maybe the true ending of a Mastram-style story wasn’t a satisfaction at all, but rather the moment when the simple identity of the stories was lost in a attempt to change them into something completely different – in other words, into a different genre of story.