What Is The Ending Of Wakefield Explained?

While all of these interpretations are fun, it’s also important to note the purely poetic value of the writing in the final pages of the book. After a long time for developing characters and plotting, the prose becomes sparse and clean, in many places bordering on the hypnotic. So while one can continue to try to interpret the work on the analytical level, at some point it simply stops mattering. The prose becomes almost music, washing over one. The experience of reading the final pages is that of experiencing a series of sentences and images and somehow being affected by them. The meaning is in the music. The book ends as a piece of abstract emotional music. The novel resolves the dissonance that had been established throughout its pages in a calm, open chord. And that is good enough. It’s even logical enough, although one cannot explain it in terms of plot. That is what great writing does: it bypasses the brain and goes straight to the nerves.

This ending is so boldly and unapologetically committed to the bitterness of the narrator's Woom origin story that it’s impressive in an era of lots of feeling and lots of protection of readers from the harsh realities of some fiction. There is no redemptive change or unexpected twist that explains that everything the narrator has lived with about Woom was a cruel, cosmically cynical trick. No. He was brutally, savagely and worst-of-all permanently violated, and that violation has forever changed him to be as broken as he is. That’s all there is to it. And we have no answer to the questions about what the violation did to him other than what we read on the page. The end. A bold, unflinching, thoroughly unhelpful and harsh exploration of the basics of some of the worst aspects of a human being who has been subjected to great, possibly irremediable trauma. Just sit with this. Just feel it. Accept this premise and grapple with its implications on a deeply emotional and philosophical level.

Lurking and learning. This Rabbit of mine is only known to me through cultural osmosis. I haven’t read any of the books. But these comments about the different endings have been so thoughtful and generated such different, yet equally relevant and true, insights about the book and its characters that it’s as though everyone were reading a different book. And yet, they’re all clearly grounded in the same material. It’s a wonderful tribute to Updike’s writing and it makes me want to read the series. It’s the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading it. Might have to put this up my TBR list.

Thanks for portraying Hades in a positive but stern light. I like that he is a truly opposing force to Orpheus and that he does keep his end of the bargain. But whereas Orpheus embodies chaos, emotion and art, Hades represents order, contracts and harsh reality. It was bound to happen sooner or later, but their collision of two vastly opposing worldviews is what in the end makes for such great storytelling. A force of order wins the day, but not in a boring way. It is a dark, cold and solid reality as Hades is. But, on the other hand, art, expression, human emotion and psyche are not defeated. The loud, passionate and unending song of Orpheus will live on. In the end that’s what I find really sophisticated about this story: it’s not just about good winning against evil or vice versa. It’s just that the world as it is today is better than the world that could have been.

This is told from the antagonist’s point of view. The final chapter is written from his diary entries. Instead of reading his obsession as monstrous, his reasoning for how he proceeds with his fantasy is explained in a deeply human manner. It’s clear that he views himself as a protector of her, as a curator of her life. Thus, his intrusion into her life is framed as care. The protagonist’s increasing change of routine, as well as her visible happiness with her friends in the preceding chapter, are here seen by the antagonist as tests or cries for help. He writes that she is ‘irretrievably corrupted’ by the outside world and that she is no longer worthy of his preservation. The reason for her safety is the reason for her profound dehumanization. His interest in her is simply dropped and he moves on.

I got totally caught up in how the book flips its promises in the last act — what starts like a simple romantic quest turns into something messier and much kinder. PJ really sets out with one goal: drive to the retirement community called 'Tender Hearts' to ask his high‑school love, Michelle, to marry him. The traveling cast (his strained adult daughter Sophie, two suddenly orphaned kids, and the uncanny therapy cat Pancakes) turns that promise into a chaotic, sideways family road trip instead of a straightforward proposal. Along the way the kids demand a detour to confront a soap‑opera actor they think is their dad, which goes about as well as you’d expect — it’s a comic, heartbreaking episode that exposes how desperate the kids are for roots and how imperfect adult solutions can be. That detour and several other misadventures lead them into Arizona for a funeral at Tender Hearts, and that’s where the big twist lands: PJ decides to propose, but Michelle reveals that Ed Cobb (the man she mourns) was actually PJ’s biological father, which means Michelle is his half‑sister. It’s cruelly hilarious and devastating all at once. Instead of a neat romantic finale, the ending gives PJ something else: accountability and slow repair. He and the others end up staying at Tender Hearts for a little while, PJ begins going to AA meetings, and then a phone call reveals that Ivy was never vacationing in Alaska but is seriously ill and wants to be married before she dies — which brings everyone back home for one last wedding. The emotional arc finishes on a tone of fragile hope rather than cinematic resolution, and I loved how Hartnett chose compassion and connection over a tidy happy ending.

So I'm mad about the ending of the book. After all that build up to cosmological scales, and and all those powerful ancient entities, and a world ending rift, it all gets solved by the power of love. Literally. The protaganist has to think about his boyfriend for a long time, and that is enough to stave off a primordial force of light. All of the interesting moral decisions about how to use power, and the cost of that power, get dumped in favor of a simple sacrifice, and it's all made to look wishy washy and a bad thing. The novel was exploring fear and persecution of weirdness and difference, and then it just kind of wraps up all those systemic problems with a cute little cottage and the protagonist and his boyfriend. I felt like the author wanted a happy ending, but wasn’t willing to actually work out the narrative to get there in a satisfying way. The ‘powers’ that have been sort of used as backstory for the entire novel are never actually explained in any sort of coherent way, and just sort of function as needed to advance the plot. I wanted some consequences and some real choice and some real teeth. Instead, I got a bunch of nothing with a great setup behind it.

That was a lot of in-depth analysis. Some endings are just that – she goes to the bar and gets murdered. The end. There’s no need for every book to be a five-page thesis.

What I saw in this was an extreme metaphor for coming to terms with non-normative identities and how the world not providing a language for somebody’s true self can lead that person to create their own language, no matter how ‘monstrous’ others might perceive it to be. Natsuki’s ‘alien’ identity is her true self and it is wonderful that she gets to live that truth at the end of the novel, however catastrophically. I see this in dark mirror to coming-out stories and the extreme violence of that act of self-realization comes from tearing off the ‘human’ mask that was never quite a good fit for her in the first place. Not a message or solution, but a powerful and haunting illustration of the potential psychological violence of forced conformity.

My favorite part of the conclusion of this story is the villainous resolution of Lord Valerius. For so long the story portrays the man as power hungry and willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goals. He is resurrecting his ancient kingdom, long lost to the heroes of legend. But in the end, the hero uses the Shroud to show Valerius what his kingdom could have been had he pursued it through peaceful means. A kingdom that would have easily integrated into the modern world. With tears in his eyes, Lord Valerius helps to stop the ritual, and in doing so, sacrifices himself to stabilize the energy released by the Shroud. He is not killed by the hero in a fierce battle, but rather dies a tragic, weeping, regretful man. It makes the heroes’ victory seem earned and not black and white. In fact, it makes the heroes triumph in that they were able to offer the man a way to make amends for his past acts of vengeance, a way that he could not refuse.