What Happens At The Ending Of 'The Moustache'? Explained

I read ‘The Moustache’ by Emmanuel Carrère a while back and ever since then the ending has been sticking in my head. A sort of haunting tune. The story begins with the male protagonist Marc shaving his off before going out to dinner with his wife Agnès and then everything begins to fall apart for him as he tries to convince her and then the rest of the world that he used to have a moustache. It’s a psychological thriller but it’s also a really interesting exploration of perception and identity. But the ending is so ambiguous and it’s really great. After descending into a dark world of uncertainty and existential fear, the protagonist finally gets his wife to admit that he never had a moustache. The ending is very intense and after it has all unfolded, the reader is left with the impression of the completely isolated protagonist staring at a family photo of himself and his wife, his face blurred out of recognition.

What I find most disturbing about the ending of The Moustache, however, is not the twist itself but rather the resignation of the protagonist, who after grappling with the question of reality, simply gives up. He is left staring at a family photograph of himself, his face (and thus he himself) unrecognizable in a blur of white. Did he imagine the whole mustache business? Is he in some sort of parallel universe? In employing ambiguity to probe the human psyche in crisis, French author Emmanuel Carrère created a story that is at once a cautionary tale about the fragility of the human psyche and the hazards of trying to impose order on a seemingly chaotic world. And it is this story, with all its complexity and disquiet, that I most recommend to my friends — with the hope that they too will be sufficiently unsettled by it.

The style in the last scene is so clean and sharp. There is no need for melodrama. We simply are told to listen to the sound of the razor, to feel the cold water on his face, to see his numb expression. This is so effective because there is no need for further description. The author has created such a stark and powerful scene, and by simple recounting of the facts, we experience the horror of it all. The ending is not some gory or explosive scene where the hero screams. No. The true horror is in a simple, mundane activity of shaving that is transformed into a possible religious ritual of purification that fails.

Many readings of this story find a somewhat religious undercurrent. The moustache is a false idol to maturity, the nursing home is purgatory or even a confessional, the grandmother hands down a sacred, forbidden knowledge, and young Mike loses his innocence. By cutting off his moustache the older man is performing a ritual of washing away sin, but the sin he is washing away is merely the human desire to know more, to become more, to touch the past. The story thus is inherently tragic, for Mike lost his innocence as soon as he donned the hair of maturity and entered the nursing home.

There’s a simple narrative too, of getting more than you wished for. Mike wished for some online cred and ended up getting a great family memory instead. The cosmic imbalancing act is hilarious and, in the end, tragic. He’s like someone who ordered a soft drink, only to be given some foul, supernatural elixir instead. The big bug in the bottle gives him visions of past times, and Mike is woefully unequipped to deal with all of that. His answer is to spew it out and hope to blot the taste from his memory, but he’ll never succeed at that.