How Does 'My Friends' Novel End?

Question

Finishing that manhua, the ending felt rushed—want spoilers for the novel’s true final chapters and characters' fates.

jerrica sellers · Answer

I haven’t read My Friends, so my best bet for a recap on that one would be to find a discussion on a site like Reddit or the web novel’s comments. Alternately, a book with a really compelling found family would be My Three Mates, which follows a group of people thrown into the wilderness together and stuck relying on each other to survive, and ends with a surprisingly poignant unlocking of the shared trauma of the group.

Uriah · Answer

Delving into the end of ‘My Friends’ is like peeling an onion. There are lots of layers and each of them reveals new things about human connections. But instead of a dramatic showdown to mark the end of the book, the finale is characterized by lots of introspective scenes.

The greatest drama of all, however, is left unresolved between two friends. Instead of having a final showdown, they exchange letters and eventually recognize their differences, as they have grown up as adults.

What truly enhances this finale is the body of the protagonist’s journal entries all throughout the book. This writings reflect upon guilt, growth and letting go. And the very last paragraph contains just the one line of the unsent text message – a very poignant comment on the nature of friendships in today’s fast paced world.

Talia · Answer

I found the ending of ‘My Friends’ really moving. The last chapters of the book demonstrate how the relationships of the main group of characters are changed by time and distance. The protagonist of the book has to come to terms with the fact that he has to let go of his nostalgia of his childhood and his friends. Reunions with some members of the group are worked into the last chapters, including some re-establishing of relationships that had been broken and others that had remained unbroken despite the distance of time and space. Above all, I remember the last scene in which the main protagonist of the book walks away from the place where he used to meet up with his friends as a child. There is no sadness in his gait but rather gratitude for what they were.

Ian · Answer

An ending with ‘bite’? My Friends delivers. The friends have their last meeting of the group at a wedding, in a state of intoxication and of nostalgia. There is lots of catharsis and some big revelations like the friend who felt excluded all those years or the friend who in secret had always been in love with the main character of the movie. No solution to any of the problems, but after all, the characters are more real.

The brilliant epilogue then jumps five years forward from the big night, and we see how various friendships developed further or went out of existence. But one thing the reader knows about our protagonist is that he or she treasures the past but doesn’t hold on to it, which is why the childhood photo of his/her friends from way back when is on their desk five years later. They look at it occasionally but they don’t get wistful about things the way others do.

Elijah Dean · Answer

The ending of Sam works by contradicting the “found family” trope so prevalent today and arguing that those families can fall apart just as biological families do. The novel also leaves the biological family of the protagonist unresolved, in particular his distant father. It suggests that seeking a perfect, permanent replacement family in friends is doomed to fail. The true stability can come from within, and from connections that do not burden the individual with the expectations of a family. Sam works because he is not a “brother” to anyone. The novel argues that a limited undemanding bond is all the family anyone needs. It’s a message that’s hard to swallow but resonates with people who have been crushed by the expectations of a supposedly “perfect” friend group.

Eugenio L. Gom-o Jr. · Answer

This audio book adds another layer of depth to the end. I find the narrator does a great job bringing relief in the quiet of the list-making, the weight lifting, and the sadness left behind. He also does a great job in bringing out the ambient sounds in the final outdoor scene. A lot of silence, and then the sound of water, birds, etc. As opposed to the loud, claustrophobic world of texts, meetings, and arguments that he was immersed in before. It really brought home the simpler, more sensory reality that he was returning to. If you only read the book, I would highly recommend listening to the last hour or so. It completely transformed my view of the end from sad to peacefully resolved.

Leramo Ayodeji Mat · Answer

So this ending is about thresholds too. The whole book Leo has been standing in a doorway between two different worlds, afraid to cross over. Here in the last scene he finally does. The other side of the threshold is the riverbank. Sam is there too. He has crossed his own threshold as well. They are standing on this new side of things together. But they are not talking about the room they left behind. They are beginning to explore this new place where they are. Leo is looking at Sam and then at the water in front of them. The ending is full of potential, not closure. The ending is the beginning of a new, quiet, undefined chapter in Leo’s life.

Thomas Gallagher · Answer

So I'm contra to this that the book is realistic. The lack of confrontation between Leo and his friend who cost him millions and his company was really unsatisfying to me. For someone who has lost everything to a friend of theirs, it’s not ‘mature’ to accept that they’ve lost everything to a friend of theirs. That would be traumatic for them. Instead the book frames the silence of his friend as some sort of wisdom. And Leo seems pretty non at peace to me. The only way he’s dealt with the loss of his company and millions of dollars is to suppress his emotions in order to gain some sort of enlightenment. I didn’t find it to be wise at all, I found it to be pretty gag inducing.

BLA · Answer

From a writing craft perspective, the ending is bold and scary. It does not give the reader the satisfaction of solving the mystery, or of having Leo and Marco reunited in some manner. Rather, the reader is left to grapple with the after-effects of the novel’s events, just as Leo is. Thus the primary tension of the novel is not who did what to whom, but rather how is Leo going to deal with this? The answer that the novel gives to this question is simple: Leo deals with it on a daily basis. He is still here, and he has grown as a result of what has happened to him. The end of the novel is not a happy one, but it is a healed one. The prose in the final chapter is written in a style that is slightly more omniscient than the tight, anxious third-person limited of the preceding chapters. The effect is one of peace, of relief, even as if the universe itself were sighing in satisfaction at Leo’s growth. It is a technically brilliant shift in style to underscore Leo’s growth.

Rodney Keyes · Answer

Man, the ending of this book crushed me because I recognize it. Not the betrayal by the tech genius, but the gradual drifting apart. I recognize the scene years later where the main character has awkward, stilted coffee with his friend from the past. I recognize that it hurts to this day, and The Book has described it beautifully. The ending does not provide a solution or a fix to the painful feelings that The Book so skillfully portrays. Instead, it acknowledges that this will hurt and that life, to date, contains a lot of pain, but also a lot of good, and Leo is now giving guidance that he never received as a young man. He has created a new purpose for himself, and that is to be a teacher. In a quiet, grown-up way, he finds happiness on his fishing trip, practicing presence over productivity.

Pragati Kumar Singh · Answer

What the book achieves above all is to validate the private ending of Leo’s story over the public one. The public ending of the story of the man who founded a major company and watched it fail is one that will be trotted out as a cautionary tale for web entrepreneurs in tech blogs for years to come. The private ending on the riverbank with his friends of many years was peaceful and validated the quiet recovery he had made from the scandals of his life. In our culture we are addicted to the story of the scandal, of the failure. This novel insists that the real story of Leo’s latter years, of quiet recovery from personal scandals and of sustaining a true friendship over decades, is of far greater significance to us than the publicly recognized story of his downfall as the founder of a high-profile company. The book is a reclaiming of his story from the prying eyes of the public.

How Does 'My Friends' Novel End?

11 Answers

Related Books

The Comeback: How I Destroyed the Friend Who Ruined Me

The Lie of My Childhood Friend

I Let My Three Childhood Friends Die

Her Best Friend

My Best Friend's Marriage Scheme

My Best Friend Played Dead and Played Me

Related Questions

How does Friends of Dorothy end?

How does 'my childhood friends are trying to kill me' end?

How does 'My Brilliant Friend' end?

How does The Cows novel end?

What is the ending of they beg for my return novel?

How does Broken novel end?

How does little mushroom novel end?

What is the ending of tell no one novel?

How does Marnie end in the novel?

How does Good Intentions novel end?