How Does The Minus Man End?

Question

Finished the novel, but the ambiguous finale has me debating the killer's true motives and the resolution's impact with other readers online.

Tonia Imachede · Answer

Thanks for the spoilers on A Man Impossible to Find – it seems to end on a somewhat ironic note when the protagonist abandons the system that he spent so long fighting. Meanwhile, I am currently reading A Man Already Gone. As the title suggests, the man in this novel disappears at the very start of the story. The rest of the plot follows the hidden clues which this man left behind in order to unravel his mystery. It remains to be seen whether or not the man will ever be found.

Julia · Answer

The Minus Man is a really, really weird and mesmerizing film and its ending is exactly as weird and mesmerizing as the rest of the film. The movie follows Vann, a serial killer who isn’t motivated by any kind of rage or grandiose purpose. He kills because that’s what he does. And the film ends without any kind of tie down or resolution for Vann. He’s pulled over for a broken taillight and the two cops have no idea that they’ve just pulled over a serial killer. The film is sort of implicitly asking the question of how many Vanns are there and how many of them are just walking around unnoticed?

The ending is in no way conventional or flashy. The vast majority of films try to create some sense of closure or comprehension for their audience. But The Minus Man is a film which barely acknowledges its viewers existence, and so, in turn, we are left with the same questions and nothing more. It is stark and simple and quite horrific. Vann is by far the most realistic serial killer to have been portrayed on film. His blend of bland everyday-ness with utter innocence is far more chilling than any cartoon monster. The last shot of him in the back of a police car, expressionless, is he going to get away with it all? We shall never know.

Quincy · Answer

'ERROR: PLAYER SLAUGHTERED' isn't what you'd call a 'satisfying' ending, but rather very effective and terribly true to life. After a really engrossing and rarely beautiful ride, the film ends with a complete anticlimax: Vann is caught for something completely trivial, and the police have NO IDEA that a serial killer has just been arrested and is sitting in the back of their car. The final shot of him sitting calmly in the back of a car is hauntingly amazing. No artificially happy ending here, just the cold, hard and uncomfortable reality that some truly terrible people are never brought to justice for their atrocities.

Lydia · Answer

The ending to ‘The Minus Man’ is one of those scenes where after the movie has ended you are left in a daze for a long time after. We see Vann Siegert, the leading man, roamin around doing what he wants, killing who he pleases and as a viewer we follow him throughout. In the final scenes of the film, he is caught by the cops but not for his countless murders, but for a minor traffic infringement. The irony is that he gets caught for something so mundane and that the two police officers that arrested him have no idea who they have just picked up off the street. The final scene is of Vann sitting in the back of a police car with a faint smirk on his face as if to say “this is absurd”.

What is more fascinating is that this film refuses to bring closure to the main character. No confrontation or realization of his crimes will be revealed in this movie. The entire film follows the quiet life of a serial killer and in the end, he’s just walking off into the horizon, perhaps to slaughter more people. The commentary on how society fails to recognize the hidden monsters living right next to us is excellent. The ambiguity and the unease of never knowing if he’ll be caught or if he’s just another “minus” in the system is what makes this film great.

Cheri Mosher · Answer

This can be read as a critique of the true-crime genre. Readers, like Detective Ferrin, have spent the better part of the book trying to determine the ‘why’ behind a character’s heinous actions, attempting to gain insight into the mind of a monster. More than that, we search for a rational or even irrational motive for their actions and a turning point where things went horribly wrong for them. Vann has no clear motive for his actions and he doesn’t even understand them himself. He is caught due to forensic evidence and not through any keen insight into human nature. Ferrin’s long speech at the end of the novel is that of a consumer of mystery who has found none. He is left with a ‘minus’, without any answer to the questions that have been posed throughout the novel. In viewing the reader’s desire to understand the monstrous, Vann implies that this desire in and of itself creates a void that cannot be filled. The novel is a deeply intelligent and meta exploration of the genre of true-crime.

Marguerite D'Avignon · Answer

It is unpleasant reading for the practical-minded person. It has an undramatic climax and a philosophical conclusion. While we do learn the ultimate fate of Vann the protagonist in this story, we are not given the emotional closure we have been reading for. Instead we are left with the thematic solution of the story. The concept of the ‘minus’ is taken to its logical conclusion. A servant of the minus is captured by Ferrin. But his capture does not remove the minus from the world. It merely removes one of its agents. The minus continues to exist in the world of the story and in the mind of Ferrin the reader. Whether one is satisfied with the story or not depends on whether one has been successfully engaged with the theme of the story. Reading for plot is unrewarding here. But reading for ideas is like hearing a bell run.

Kim Neumann · Answer

This is how a novel about haunting ends: not with any ghostly visits, but with a long, dark exploration of psychological haunting. Vann does not haunt Ferrin. The concept of Vann, or rather the idea of a human being so completely empty, so completely functional, yet with little to no firmware to govern the normal flow of human emotions, haunted Ferrin. And now Ferrin is documenting this haunting, trying to exorcise the “minus” that haunts him by defining it. But the more he tries to define it, the more real it becomes. By the end of the novel, Vann has succeeded in infecting the world with his emptiness. And Ferrin is now a permanent host to all that Vann has poured into the world. Chilling.

Jhun Raguin · Answer

That ending is just so trippy and it’s been years since I finished the book and it still gets under my skin. So the final section of the book follows Vann in a somewhat passive confrontation with the authorities, because he’d been delivering his poisoned booze to what he considered to be ‘minuses’. But it wasn’t a thrilling chase or fight, no. Instead the police had worked hard to uncover his identity, and they just talked to him. The gut-punch of the epilogue, which is told from the perspective of one of the detectives who identified him, is that Vann is in prison, writing his letters as ever, completely detached. There’s no sense of him having changed or grown in prison, he’s just existing. And the detective is left with a sense of deep emptiness, realizing that Vann had never been a grandly evil person, just a rather ordinary, hollow man who was creating more and more hollow spaces in the world. And that last line about the ‘minus’ never closing absolutely haunts me. The implication is that the void that Vann represents is still at large, still operating, even though he’s behind bars.

Anna Ruth Frie Tribble · Answer

The ending of the book is mostly told through the prose. Vann’s sections are clean and detached. Ferrin’s final section is a mess of searching and metaphor and frustrated abstraction. The killer’s world is one of simple, elegant order. The world of meaning and justice is one of uneasy, bewildering complexity. McCarry’s writing has shifted greatly here from Vann’s detached, simple tone to the complex, abstract tone of Ferrin as he struggles to articulate the ‘minus’. He is being contaminated by the very thing he has been trying to keep at arms length. The ending is not just told, it is performed through this rupture in the normal narrative voice. The form buckles under the pressure of the theme, and that’s pretty brilliant when you think about it.

Nomi Gcortes · Answer

This is really interesting to read as it clearly has divided opinion. I personally think it’s a masterpiece but I can understand the frustration of readers who were expecting a more conventional crime novel payoff in favor of a more literary fiction ending grafted onto the skeleton of a crime novel.

How Does The Minus Man End?

10 Answers

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