Summary Of Happy Endings By Margaret Atwood

In her short story “Happy Endings”, Margaret Atwood portrays the lives of ordinary people facing various circumstances in a series of different situations and obstacles listed from “A” to “F”, in which each scenario leads to the same conclusion. Even though the individual stories show vast differences between the beginnings and middles they all have identical endings, everyone dies regardless of the choices they made or how they lived their lives. The overall emphasis for “Happy Endings” was for Margaret Atwood to help readers, as well as other writers, understand the importance of “how and why” a conclusion is reached not what the conclusion itself is comprised of since all stories end in death. In Margaret’s words “Don’t be deluded by any …show more content…
Atwood helps people to realize that they can live life however they want to because it does not matter whether you are a saint and stay with the same person your entire life or experiment with different people to find your true love, in the end we as people will each end up right next to Mary, John, Madge, James, and Fred. The ending can never be changed, no matter how the beginnings of our stories are written or how we tell the middle; the same fate is perpetual for everyone. Whether it’s a true love story, a twisted relationship, a tragic murder and suicide, or a love story that survives a natural disaster only to be ripped apart by a human illness; no matter how it is spun death will always come for you in the end. In every scenario Atwood gives us someone always ends up living out option “A”, cementing the fact that love is the underlying life goal to be taken from Margaret Atwood’s lesson. “Happy Endings” puts emphasis on the middle because as Margaret Atwood says “True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it’s the hardest to do anything with” (Atwood 451). The “stretch in between” is the story; it is made up of so many different details and is so intricate that without it there is no ending. The argument that the middle is irrelevant is proven erroneous because really the only part that is relevant is the middle. No matter how it is told, how many times it changes, or how long it is, there is no ending without the middle because there would be no story to end. So enjoy the life you live and change it if you need to because you are going to end up in the same grave either way. "So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun (Atwood