What Is The Ending Of Three Days And A Life Novel?

Question

Loved this mystery but the finale left me so conflicted! Did Antoine's secret ever get discovered? The tension between guilt and consequence was heavy.

Claire Handford · Answer

It seems you’re confounding titles here. Three Days and a Life is a suspense novel by Pierre Lemaitre, which ends years after the scene of the first perpetrated crime by protagonist Antoine to find him haunted by it to the point of losing everything and having no idea how the rest of his life will unfold. And After Three Years: She Wakes Up is another novel on a life-changing event (a woman wakes up from a coma to find that her family and her identity have been totally transformed) to unfold in a tense personal investigation.

Una · Answer

I finally read Pierre Lemaitre’s ‘Three Days and a Life’, one of those books which will stay with you for a long time. While his crime novels have very explosive endings, ‘Three Days and a Life’ is totally different. The final scenes are actually a masterclass in quiet devastation as the truth about the accidental death of a child that 12-year-old Antoine was involved in is slowly revealed. We follow Antoine the adult as he realizes how he has built his life on a pack of lies over the decades. The final scene is heart breaking in its simplicity. We see Antoine facing up to the mother of the dead child, we know that she knows, and Antoine knows that she knows. Yet nothing changes. It is one of those endings which makes you sit in silence for a while pondering the irreversibility of things.

The ending does not bring any redemption to Antoine. He does not get to have the dramatic confrontation with the mother of the boy he killed. He does not get to say sorry to her. In fact, he does not get to do anything about the events of that childhood winter. His punishment for what he did as a child is the life he has created for himself as an adult: empty, cold, and meticulously controlled. It is a world that is very different from the explosive conclusions to Lemaitre’s crime novels. Instead this is a quietly devastating ending to a quietly devastating novel. After finishing the book I found myself gazing at the cover, wondering how long it would take for Antoine to escape his quiet hell.

Mila · Answer

The ending of 'Three Days and a Life' is like a slow motion car crash, one can see it coming but cannot turn one’s head away. The reader is introduced to the carefully constructed world of the life of Antoine, the main protagonist, and is ultimately destroyed brick by brick in the final pages of the book. However there is no dramatic showdown or moment of truth. Instead the reader is left with a very poignant scene where the mother of the boy who was killed decades before meets the grown Antoine. Her calm and knowing demeanor is actually more horrific than any accusation Lemaitre could have had written. The fact that he leaves everything unsaid and allows the reader to fill in the gaps is a pure stroke of genius. The horror of what has occurred is not what has happened but what has not happened. Both Antoine and the mother of the boy killed all those years before are doomed to carry the pain of that event with them for the rest of their lives. This ache or pain that is left with the reader long after they have finished reading the book is what makes the ending so unforgettable.

Ellie · Answer

This novel does not end well for the main character of Three Days and a Life, and if you are looking for a neat and tidy bow to be tied at the end of the story then you will be severely let down. I had hoped that somehow Antoine would be able to come to terms with what he had done as a child and how it resulted in the death of a young boy. However, as the story unfolds in the final chapters and we see the now much older Antoine return to his hometown and the mother of the dead boy all but elderly she confronts him and in a very surprising and awful twist of what I had been expecting of Lemaitre the truth is finally revealed to Antoine in a way that is worst than any of the horrible scenarios that I had been imagining for him.

Lemaitre achieves something quite wonderful by making the reader as complicit in the guilt of Antoine as Antoine himself is. But unlike what one would normally hope for in the form of a concluding catharsis, it does not arrive. Instead, one is left with the crushing burden of years that have gone by and of unhealed wounds. In the end, it is not about to hand out justice or to grant forgiveness. The story is about the fact that we have to live with our choices. When I finished reading this book, I felt quite empty, but I think that this was the author’s intention. Some stories are not meant to be concluded. They simply have to be left as they are and then the reader has to keep carrying them on.

Fred Shepard · Answer

It is the ambiguity that saves this from being overly didactic. If he had gone to the police, it would have been a redemption tale. If he had killed himself, it would have been a simple tragedy and he would have gotten the punishment he deserved. But as it is, the author makes us sit with the uncomfortable, messy reality that there is no solution to the secrets that we keep. A boy died. A man was destroyed. Secrets last forever until they don’t. What happens next does not matter because the damage is so complete and so irreversible. We are forced to imagine the consequences of his actions. Our imagining of them has us feel the full weight of the story.

David Robertson · Answer

A masterpiece of anticlimax. Because in real life, things don’t come to a dramatic conclusion 40 years later in a courtroom. We human beings are too dull-witted for that. The guilt simply festers for decades, and then one day we confess to our spouse and trudge off into the rain. So much more boring and horrifying than that, really. But effective in its own unassuming way. No soaring film score here to herald our true nature. No whiz-kid detective at last connecting dots we’d long since recognized. Instead, crushing, dull, tedium at last giving way to the awful weight of a long-festered conscience. Which is to say, this is not a crime thriller. The mystery of the action is not who did it. We knew that long ago. Rather, the novel investigates one question and gives a hollowed-out, decades-later answer to it. What does that do to a person? It hollows them out until, years or even decades later, they trudge off into the storm as a mere, hollow shell.

Frederick Louis · Answer

For me, the end of the book was surprisingly cold. I was expecting some kind of scene or reveal but instead, the novel just sort of meandered to a close. Antoine’s confessional to his wife didn’t have the kind of impact I felt it needed to after the long build up. His admission to walk into the storm seemed to be a moment that was going to be particularly powerful given how the rest of the novel has explored his anxious head, but in reality it was kind of a non-event. The novel was a slow, psychological burn but it seemed to fizzle out rather than have some kind of revelatory moment or dramatic confrontation. It would have been interesting to read more of the wife’s reaction to the impossible knowledge that Antoine had shared with her. As it was, the novel sort of cut away from the scene and we were left in the dark as to how she really felt. It was a disappointment. The rest of the book was excellent but this conclusion did not have the same impact on me as it seems to have had on many other readers.

Christine Watts-Lawrence · Answer

What gets me about this ending is the silence after the confession. We don’t get any indication of Delphine’s screams or tears. All we get is Lemaitre’s insight into Antoine’s perception of the space around him: the room is growing darker, the sound of the storm raging around them, and then there’s the sound of his own voice. That he sounds strange to himself is, in itself, a powerful comment on his isolation. Even at the moment of greatest connection in the novel, when he’s finally sharing his truth with another human being, he’s alone. The end of the novel is him alone, walking into the night. He’s been alone with this secret since he was 12 years old, and he dies alone with it, metaphorically if not literally. Connection was always going to be impossible for him.

Chris · Answer

It’s brilliant in that it completely reverses one’s impression of the novel. On first reading, one is worried that he will get caught by the law, but on second reading, one realizes that he never does get caught by the law, that the novel is a study of a man who is imprisoned by himself. The final scene is that of his release from his prison cell, even though outside it is a storm. And freedom is not a pack of roses, tossed into a sunny meadow. It is a terrible, punishing gale. But it is real. And he is trading off a comfortable lie for that terrible truth. Whether his decision is that of brave or fool, only the reader can say. But it makes all of the previous pages so claustrophobic and tragic.

What Is The Ending Of Three Days And A Life Novel?

9 Answers

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