What Happens At The Ending Of The Dead Fathers Club?

Question

Avoiding spoilers for Matt Haig's novel, but I need closure on the emotional resolution. How does the ghostly premise resolve for young Philip?

Jesse Giedd · Answer

The ending of 'The Dead Fathers Club' wraps up neatly for young Phillip in this, the third of a series of short stories featuring the deceased father of the title. In this tale, the ghost of his father is released from his Puritan nightmare when Phillip decides against seeking revenge for his father’s killing. Instead, he throws the murder weapon into the river thereby healing himself of his suppressed anger and helping his father’s spirit to finally find peace. The cure for the eternal cycle of violence and grief, it seems, is to forgive and to let bygones be bygones. This theme is powerfully reaffirmed in 'What Daddy Left Behind', where a daughter’ searching for meaning in her father’s behalf to set up a weird series of Memorial Librarys discovers some uncomfortable family secrets instead and is forced to come to terms with her own anger and grief about her Dad’s early death.

Ursula · Answer

Wow, that ending was so emotional it was like whiplash. The choice of Philip to spare his uncle was so out of character but at the same time so beautifully written in terms of him rebelling against this cycle of violence and revenge. And then the ghost’s last words were so chilling. ‘You’re just like me’. And Philip’s silence afterwards was very powerful too. As the book has already unreliable narration, it makes you question many things and Haig doesn’t make it easy for you and explain things for you. The question that was asked previously whether the ghost was a manifestation of Philip’s guilt, and did the uncle even kill his brother? The last image of Philip alone but lighter is a beautifully written quiet punch to the gut. It’s the kind of ending that makes you think about it for days.

Hazel · Answer

In the surreal and bittersweet ending to Matt Haig’s ‘The Dead Fathers Club’ we see our 11-year-old protagonist Philip finally confront the ghost of his father in order to try to carry out his father’s wishes and kill his uncle in revenge for his death. But in a moment of great insight Philip realizes just how crazy his father’s behavior was. In a final scene of haunting beauty Philip throws his knife into the river. The ghost of his father fades from view and Philip begins to heal. We are left not knowing how much of this was real and how much was just the thoughts and feelings of a child trying to come to terms with his own grievious losses.

The way it develops childhood innocence and confronts it with the darker aspects of adult behavior is extremely powerful. I also felt that Haig leaves us with the scene in a very positive manner. Philip chooses life over revenge. It’s not a neat and tidy ending but it is a very satisfying one. And one that is left with the reader long after the book has been closed. I personally didn’t feel that the supernatural elements needed any further clarification. The story is one of Philip’s emotional survival and in that respect Haig does it justice.

Noah · Answer

The ending to this book was so good it was devastating. Philip’s journey into murder began with his dead father haunting him to kill, but as the story goes on it becomes a very tender storyline. The ghost’s demands become more and more desperate, and a child is being manipulated by a ghost of his father. The climax at the river was very raw and had me feeling very cathartic. The way Haig wrote Philip throughout the story is wonderful. He is a child but at the same time he is very profound. My favorite line in the book is ‘he dissolved into nothing like sugar in water’. Even though the story wasn’t resolved at the end and we are left wondering if the uncle was guilty or not, it was hopeful in its messiness.

Marissa · Answer

I read the last two chapters of ‘The Dead Fathers Club’ yesterday and it was like watching a puzzle solve itself in reverse. Philip’s Dad, a looming specter, was the embodiment of grief’s heavy weight and his disappearance at the end of the book brought a sense of acceptance to Philip’s journey. TheUncle’s fate is left with the reader to decide whether he got what he deserved or not and whether Philip had really encountered a ghost at all. Haig leaves us with plenty of clues but none of the answers we may have been hoping for and I found this very powerful indeed. It mirrors how children process their loss in a very fragmented and surreal way. The scene on the river where Philip’s knife sinks to the bottom was a particularly powerful moment of symbolism, enabling Philip to literally and metaphorically let go of things. Above all, however, what is left with me is the sense of a very scarred but not broken child.

Stormy Allen · Answer

I read about halfway through and then had to put it down because it was giving me too much anxiety. Reading these comments about the ending makes me think that I made the right decision for my sanity right now. I appreciate books that go to really dark places but right now I need something with a little more hope in it. Even reading the description of the bridge and what happens there is giving me secondhand distress. This is clearly a powerful book, but not for me right now.

Linda Page · Answer

The style in the final chapters of the book is worth noting. Philip’s break down is mirrored in Haig’s simple, short sentences and often fragmented thoughts. Gone are the long winding descriptions of people, places and things, and the quirky observations and comments which had pervaded earlier chapters. Instead the reader is given a glimpse into the mind of a man who is stripped bare, desperate and only concerned with the immediate moment. The prose itself breaks down as the character does, only to return to a flat and exhausted calm in the final pages of the book. This is technically brilliant writing as the form of the words mirrors the emotional journey of the reader through Philip’s crises and subsequent empty calm.

misskat60 · Answer

From a structural perspective, the ending of A Perfect Collapse is a perfect collapse of the Hamlet parallel that had been set up throughout the narrative. While in Hamlet the protagonist achieves his revenge at great cost to himself and the country of Denmark, which is left in chaos under the governorship of Fortinbras, in A Perfect Collapse Philip’s quest for truth and justice collapses on a minuscule scale. There is no Fortinbras to ride in and impose order. Instead, it is a small cast of characters: a young boy, his mother, and the ruin of their lives. While Philip’s ‘play within a play’ (his school play) hinted at the resolution to come, the actual moment of truth is a sorry and ineffectual mess. Instead of pseudo-drama, the reader is left with the shocking, naked trauma of a real life that has not unfolded in a neat, Story-Like fashion – especially for children caught up in the struggles of adults.

Nena · Answer

Lastly, Uncle Alan. So much of the ending turns him on his head too. The ghost’s assertion that he is a murderer and a usurper is never fully validated. His many flaws aside, I believe Uncle Alan to be a fundamentally good and deeply loving man struggling to hold together a family falling apart. That pivotal scene on the bridge gives both Philip and the audience a profound look at Uncle Alan beyond the fictional constructs of a play. How Philip chooses to act or not act with Uncle Alan in the scene’s end is the scene’s emotional core. And it reveals to us that the real conflict of Hamlet was never about any so-called ‘crime’; rather it was a complex muddle of love, loyalty, andchange. And how horribly, heartbreakingly painful that change is for Alan in the play’s end. A complex, fundamentally good man. His struggles against the ghost’s demands provide a deeply human counterpoint to them. How that scene plays out is so heart-wrenchingly sad just because there are no villains. Just a bunch of perfectly human people causing each other incredible pain in the wake of their loved one’s death.

Luigi Duque · Answer

Ambiguity. I’ve seen a few readers get angry at Philip’s story and say that the ending was a cop-out. But to me, it was bold. Trauma, grief, mental illness – they are all inherently ambiguous. Could what Philip experienced have been a ghost, or could it have been a psychotic break? My guess is that it was a little bit of both. But, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. The external manifestation of the supernatural and the internal psychological struggle are two sides of the same coin. Demanding to know which one is “real” would be to miss the point of the story. The ambiguity of the ending forces the reader to confront the uncertainty of some of the experiences that Philip has. They are just that – ambiguous. Some things can’t be categorized as either “supernatural” or “psychological”. Philip’s reality is a mixed bag, and the ending does it justice by not trying to tell the reader that it can be reduced to one category or another. It’s braver than a happy ending would have been.

Joe Thompson · Answer

I keep thinking about the audience for this book. This is a YA/crossover book, but it’s so incredibly mature at the end. It doesn’t condescend to the YA audience by promising to fix up the main character from his or her extreme traumatic experiences. Instead, it gives them a realistic portrayal of the extreme mess and depth of their trauma. In that way, it is a more respect-filled book for a teenager dealing with grief than a “happy ending” book would be. For one thing, it recognizes that the confusing, often-overwhelming feelings of grief don’t have to have a point or lead to a positive resolution. That ending validates the experience of feeling lost in pain. That’s a powerful (even when difficult) thing to give to a reader.

Maria Goreti · Answer

From a writing craft perspective, the ending of Haig’s novel is so much better than a plot pay-off. What does happen with Philip and Alan? Is the ghost of Susan real? These are all secondary to the main question of the novel and that is the emotional cost of his obsession with Susan to Philip’s soul. Many readers will be disappointed that the novel does not deliver the ghost story that they had been expecting but for others the ending will be devastating and Haig has delivered a truly good novel that is a character study of a traumatised person and a novel that can only have been written by someone who is somehow five years older than me. He has written a truly good novel and it does what it sets out to do. It concentrates on the human story and not the mystery of the ghost. It is a superbly written novel that is filled with great insight into human nature and I feel so privileged to have read it.

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