Some final sentences tie a ribbon round a story and hand it to the reader as a satisfying gift. Others turn the whole book upside down and make you rethink everything you have just read.
Either way, the closing line is the author's last chance to make an impression and to keep the reader thinking long after the book is closed. Here are some of the most poetic, puzzling and effective last words in fiction, with a note on why each one works.
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925). Probably the most quoted last line in American fiction, and a perfect summary of a novel about trying to repeat the past.Isn't it pretty to think so?
Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Jake's dry reply to Brett's daydream closes the book on everything they cannot have.He loved Big Brother.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Four words, and the defeat is total.Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927). The painting, and the novel, are finished at the same moment.- Joseph Conrad ends Heart of Darkness (1899) on the Thames itself, the tranquil waterway that seems to lead "into the heart of an immense darkness," bringing Marlow's African nightmare home to London.
- James Joyce closes "The Dead," the last story in Dubliners (1914), with snow falling "upon all the living and the dead," one of the most beautiful cadences in English prose.
It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The portrait is young again; the man on the floor is not.Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952). The narrator turns and addresses the reader directly.- A.A. Milne ends The House at Pooh Corner (1928) by promising that, in that enchanted place at the top of the Forest, "a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." It has made grown readers cry for nearly a century.
…you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable. Despair and stubbornness in eleven words.Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.
J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Holden's advice is funny and heartbreaking at once.- Gabriel García Márquez ends One Hundred Years of Solitude with a single, enormous sentence in which the city of mirrors is erased and the Buendía family learns it will have no second chance on earth.
The last line as a final bet
Writers often compare the ending to the last hand of the night: everything the author has wagered on a book comes down to one turn of the card. Ian Fleming understood that. Casino Royale spends most of its length at the baccarat table, then closes with a brutal line Bond speaks down the telephone to London, so cold that it resets everything the reader thought about the love story. We look at that novel in Casino Royale and the baccarat game that made James Bond.
Which last line would you add? Send your favourite through our contact page, and browse more lists in Features & Book News.
