AP® English Literature and Composition review sheet from Aim for Five (aimforfive.com/lit/units/9/9-4)
Unit 9 · Topic 9.4
9.4 Endings: release, unseen pressures and loose ends
When the suspense or central conflict finally resolves, readers may feel catharsis, an emotional release. Some pressures on a character come from things the story never shows, like a character who never appears or an action that happened before the story began. And some endings leave conflicts unresolved on purpose, which shapes how you read the whole work.
Key terms
- catharsis
- resolution
- unseen character
- prior action
- unresolved ending
Catharsis: release when the conflict resolves
Catharsis is an idea from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who wrote that tragedy rouses pity and fear in the audience and brings about a catharsis of those feelings, usually understood as a purging or release. More broadly, it's the emotional release you feel when built-up suspense finally breaks.
Hamlet ends with almost every major character dead. As Hamlet dies, he says, "The rest is silence," and his friend Horatio answers, "Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince." After five acts of delay and dread, the ending is terrible, but it is also a release: the tension is over, and the play gives us a moment of grief and calm.
Pressures you never see
Not every force in a story appears on stage. A dead parent, a past crime or a person who is only mentioned can shape the characters' choices from offstage. Ask what happened before the story began and who the characters keep referring to.
In A Doll's House, the crisis comes from an action taken years before the play opens: Nora forged her dying father's signature to borrow money for a trip that saved Torvald's life. Her father never appears, but his name drives the plot. In Hamlet, the murder of the old king happens before the play starts and pushes every event that follows.
Unresolved endings
Some works end without settling the central conflict. That isn't a flaw; it's a choice that hands the question to you. An open ending often makes the work's central question stick with you longer than a neat answer would.
A Doll's House has one of the most famous open endings in drama. Nora tells Torvald that for their marriage to work, they would both have to change so much "That our life together would be a real wedlock." She leaves. Torvald, alone, wonders whether there's still hope: "The most wonderful thing of all—?" Then the stage direction: "The sound of a door shutting is heard from below." Will Nora come back? Will Torvald change? The play won't say. The ending was so controversial that for an early German production, whose leading actress refused to play it, Ibsen reluctantly wrote a different ending in which Nora stays for her children. He disliked it, and the original ending is the one we read today.
Worked examples
Try each one yourself first, then open the solution.
- Example 1
Interpreting an unresolved ending
A Doll's House ends with Torvald asking, "The most wonderful thing of all—?" followed by the stage direction "The sound of a door shutting is heard from below." Earlier, Nora says, "I don't believe any longer in wonderful things happening." Explain how the unresolved ending shapes the play's meaning.
Show the solutionHide the solution
- Step 1: Identify what's unresolved: whether Nora will return and whether Torvald can change.
- Step 2: Connect the repeated word: "wonderful" echoes Nora's earlier hope that Torvald would sacrifice himself for her, a hope he disappointed.
- Step 3: Contrast the two characters at the end: Nora no longer believes in miracles; Torvald now does. Their positions have reversed.
- Step 4: Explain the effect of the door: a sound, not an answer. It ends the scene but not the question, which passes to the audience.
Answer: Sample answer: Ibsen ends with a question and a sound instead of a resolution, and that choice makes the audience finish the play. Torvald's hopeful "The most wonderful thing of all—?" picks up the word Nora has just given up on, so the two have traded places: she now sees clearly, and he is left hoping for a miracle. The door shutting "from below" answers him without words. By refusing to say whether Nora returns, Ibsen shifts the question from what happens to this couple to what would have to change in marriage itself, which is exactly what made the ending so disturbing to its first audiences.
Common mistakes
- Calling an open ending "confusing" or "unfinished." Explain what the lack of resolution makes you think about.
- Ignoring events before the story begins. Prior actions often cause the main conflict.
- Using catharsis to mean any sad ending. It's the release of tension that has built up.
On the exam
- Multiple-choice questions may ask about the effect of an ending or what an earlier event (before the passage) suggests about a character's situation. Look for references to the past and to offstage characters.
- In the literary argument essay, the ending is almost always worth discussing, since it's where a work's ideas about its conflict become clearest, or most clearly unsettled.
Connected topics
Videos
Check yourself
5 questions on 9.4 Endings: release, unseen pressures and loose ends. Pick an answer to see if you got it, and why.
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act I (first performed 1895; published 1899)
Bunbury, the “permanent invalid” Algernon describes in paragraph 15, never appears on stage. He matters to the plot chiefly because
Jack’s invented brother Ernest and Algernon’s invented Bunbury serve parallel purposes in that both
Anton Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (1904), the end of Act IV, translated by Julius West (1916)
The stage direction in paragraph 14, in which Lubov and Gaev “sob restrainedly and quietly, fearing that somebody might hear them,” suggests that they
The offstage voices calling “Mother!” and “Coo-ee!” (paragraphs 17–22) affect the scene chiefly by
The play’s ending, with Fiers lying “without moving,” the sound of “a breaking string,” and “the axe falling on the trees” (paragraphs 25–26), is best described as
0 of 5 answered