Over the past two months we’ve witnessed the ends of two cultural phenomena, the Sopranos and Harry Potter. Those of us with a melancholy bent towards nostalgia can already imagine looking back on these moments with hazy pleasure, remembering life Back When.
I know that I’m in the minority when I say that the Sopranos finale blew me away, and that Deathly Hallows ended with jarring satisfaction (though the book as a whole was far from perfect). It’s been a good year for endings.
It’s natural to consider endings like last words, providing insight into the essence of the work. In college we would speculate on how Calvin & Hobbes would end. The conclusion we came up with — in which an inert Hobbes is left alone in the final panel after Calvin goes off to play with a human friend — reflects our post-adolescent angst more than the strip. (In fact, the strip ended famously with “It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy!”). Peanuts ended rather abruptly (and perhaps more typically) with the hastily-scrawled farewell of creator Charles Schultz, who died shortly thereafter.
In the world of moving pictures, Seinfeld copped out with the equivalent of an “it was all a dream” when nothing more than a bureaucratic legal system sends the characters off to Consequence. Some years later, “Revenge of the Sith” hammered a stake into the undead heart of the second Star Wars trilogy.
The endings that Matter, of course, are the ones that codafy the work and epitomize its relationship to us. Detractors of the final Sopranos episode, I think, probably didn’t understand that the series wasn’t really about gangsters but rather the struggle to be Someone in suburban America. The Journey lyrics to hear wasn’t the “Don’t stop” of the flash ending, but the story of two people desperate to find meaning and feeling in a colorless world. In some ways, Tony’s story reaches its logical conclusion in the preceding scene, when Junior’s lost identity demonstrate that the family project has all been vanity. The circle is complete, and the wheel turns.
I actually found the ending of Deathly Hallows far more jarring. By “ending” I mean the epilogue, nineteen years after the close of the main story, and as the last line suggests, nineteen years after the End of (Wizarding) History. In a series notorious for inventing new rules to break old ones, this breaking of a core narrative rule — the year-by-year passage of time — comes as a bit of a shock. The text provides no physical clues as to how our protagonists look, and so one can only imagine a teenage Rupert Grint in thirtysomething clothing (sorry, Ms. GrandPré, but I’m afraid the movie actors have robbed me of your side of the story). For those of us who look back fondly on our teens or college years, jumping through all those years — to a point, for me, just a few years from now — with so little of Consequence happening in between suggests that the best years of our life have indeed passed. (Not so for Ms. Rowling, who started writing Philosopher’s Stone at 25). Indeed, the epilogue purposefully puts the new batch of children right back in the shoes of their parents. And so the wheel turns again.
