Take the novel Mrs. Dalloway, while the ending is more precise than say Larsen’s Passing, there is still a question of what is to come. After the death of Septimus, Clarissa begins musing about him. “She felt somehow very like him… She felt glad that he had done it… He made her feel the beauty,” and then at the very end of the book, “What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement? It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was” (Woolf 110, 115). With these quotes, Virginia Woolf leaves the novel open ended while still providing the reader with a feeling of closure. Woolf enables these conflicting statements to happen by the way she lays out the novel. Septimus’ death, a closure type situation, happens at the end of the novel, but still
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While sequels provide temporary open endings and authors like Woolf allow for more interpretations, there are some authors, like Cervantes, that do not want this to happen. At the end of his novel, Cervantes goes so far as to warn the author who had written the false sequel to Don Quijote “…that he’d better let the weary, powdered bones of Don Quijote rest in their tomb and not even think of raising them against all Death’s laws” (Cervantes 746). This indicts the reader as well as it seems Cervantes wants Quijote to stay firmly at rest. Benjamin appears to be on Cervantes’ side as he argues that “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about” and by this death it can either be figurative, the book closing and the novel ending, or the literal character’s demise (Benjamin 88). If Benjamin is correct, and the reader searches for the meaning of life in closure-oriented books so that he or she can feel more alive, than Cervantes has certainly catered to that affect. However, the death of a character does not effectively stop the reader from creating more questions about this literary world. Don Quijote may be dead but there are still questions about why he denounced his knighthood so quickly or if his niece will heed his advice. The death of a character effectively ends the book, but just because it is time to close the book that does not mean it is time to erase everything that has been read. As I will express later, the book can be read numerous times to gain new perspectives but even if it is not re-read these questions do not disappear. Readers are warmed by the death of Don Quijote, but they are set ablaze by the questions left behind by various passages throughout the novel that will never be answered. Therefore, though this novel, and Woolf’s, are completed they still allow for the same sort of lessons to be taught
While sequels provide temporary open endings and authors like Woolf allow for more interpretations, there are some authors, like Cervantes, that do not want this to happen. At the end of his novel, Cervantes goes so far as to warn the author who had written the false sequel to Don Quijote “…that he’d better let the weary, powdered bones of Don Quijote rest in their tomb and not even think of raising them against all Death’s laws” (Cervantes 746). This indicts the reader as well as it seems Cervantes wants Quijote to stay firmly at rest. Benjamin appears to be on Cervantes’ side as he argues that “What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about” and by this death it can either be figurative, the book closing and the novel ending, or the literal character’s demise (Benjamin 88). If Benjamin is correct, and the reader searches for the meaning of life in closure-oriented books so that he or she can feel more alive, than Cervantes has certainly catered to that affect. However, the death of a character does not effectively stop the reader from creating more questions about this literary world. Don Quijote may be dead but there are still questions about why he denounced his knighthood so quickly or if his niece will heed his advice. The death of a character effectively ends the book, but just because it is time to close the book that does not mean it is time to erase everything that has been read. As I will express later, the book can be read numerous times to gain new perspectives but even if it is not re-read these questions do not disappear. Readers are warmed by the death of Don Quijote, but they are set ablaze by the questions left behind by various passages throughout the novel that will never be answered. Therefore, though this novel, and Woolf’s, are completed they still allow for the same sort of lessons to be taught