How Does 'In The Waiting Room' End?

The ending of 'In the Waiting Room' hits like a quiet thunderclap. The young protagonist, while flipping through a National Geographic, sees photos of naked African women and has this sudden, visceral realization about adulthood and mortality. It's not a dramatic revelation, but this subtle shift where childhood innocence starts crumbling. She hears her aunt's scream from the dentist's office, and it mirrors her internal panic. The poem closes with her sitting there, frozen, realizing she's just one person in a vast, terrifying world. The genius is in how ordinary the moment feels—just a kid in a waiting room, but the weight of existence crashes down silently. That's what makes it so powerful.

Elizabeth Bishop's 'In the Waiting Room' concludes with a masterful blend of the mundane and the existential. The narrator, a seven-year-old girl, experiences an epiphany while waiting for her aunt during a dentist appointment. As she examines the National Geographic photos, particularly the images of bare-breasted African women, she confronts the raw reality of human bodies and cultural difference for the first time. The moment is jarring—her aunt's sudden cry from the next room echoes her own internal disorientation.

What follows is a profound identity crisis. The girl realizes with startling clarity that she is both separate from and connected to the world around her. The poem's closing lines emphasize this duality—she's just 'one of them,' yet utterly alone in her realization. Bishop doesn't resolve this tension; instead, she leaves the narrator (and the reader) suspended in that uncomfortable awareness. The ending resonates because it captures the universal human experience of confronting our smallness in a vast, incomprehensible universe.

For those interested in similar works exploring childhood epiphanies, I'd recommend James Joyce's 'Araby' or Sylvia Plath's 'Blackberrying.' Both grapple with moments of disillusionment that shape a person's understanding of the world.

That ending still gives me chills. The poem builds this ordinary scene—a kid waiting, flipping through magazines—then BAM, existential dread. The photos of tribal women aren't just shocking; they shatter her bubble. She sees their pierced breasts, realizes bodies are weird, painful things, and suddenly adulthood isn't abstract anymore. Her aunt's scream from the dentist's office isn't just pain—it's the sound of growing up. The last lines are genius: 'I was my foolish aunt, / I—we—were falling, falling.' She doesn't just observe the world now; she's part of its chaos.

What I love is how Bishop makes this feel universal. We've all had that moment where the world got bigger and scarier. If you liked this, try 'The Glass Essay' by Anne Carson—another poem about quiet personal earthquakes.