There is no such thing as a happy ending. The first and simplest reason being there is no such thing as an ending, as Junot Diaz reminds us with The Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan’s wise words in The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends (Moore).” The second reason being happiness is not a destination no matter how badly we wish it was. Happiness will always be fleeting, and suffering will always feel like home. The third reason is that stories of the human experience are by definition stories of failure. Humans are flawed, and our shared fukú is our acute awareness of our seemingly innumerable flaws and our inability to conquer them despite that awareness, and the characters we have read about are no different. In Don Delillo’s White Noise, Junot Diaz’s The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed the characters are all haunted by feelings of discontent that leave them restless.
White Noise’s Jack Gladney is an odd and unsure man with an …show more content…
This goal is why he moves from Anarres, the planet he was born on, to Urras, the planet his people’s ancestors came from. Through Shevek, we are told about different societies that function in different ways including anarchy and communism. These societies have opposing ideologies, but Shevek tells us, “It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood (LeGuin, 300).” Shevek realizes that pain is the only thing we all share while also having to experience it alone. Pain is consistent and indiscriminate, and through pain we can see one another as people who have and will
White Noise’s Jack Gladney is an odd and unsure man with an …show more content…
This goal is why he moves from Anarres, the planet he was born on, to Urras, the planet his people’s ancestors came from. Through Shevek, we are told about different societies that function in different ways including anarchy and communism. These societies have opposing ideologies, but Shevek tells us, “It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers. We are brothers in what we share. In pain, which each of us must suffer alone, in hunger, in poverty, in hope, we know our brotherhood (LeGuin, 300).” Shevek realizes that pain is the only thing we all share while also having to experience it alone. Pain is consistent and indiscriminate, and through pain we can see one another as people who have and will