Happy Endings

Happy Endings

-       Margaret Atwood (1983)

John and Mary meet.  What happens next?  If you want a happy ending, try A.

            It’s funny because upon choosing to read A first not only because it was placed at the top of the page under the title, but also because the author took the time to deliberately point it out should have been enough to sustain me between the couple, John and Mary.  Everyone wants a good beginning, middle and end like the one in A for John and Mary.  Heck, we even want that for ourselves.  But it was too perfect.  It was, “too happy” for me to be anywhere near satisfaction, and so I kept reading.  I read all possible outcomes a few times actually, until I realized what it was that I was doing.  I was deliberately looking for something malicious to happen to them.  I was looking for that resistance between John, and Mary, I was looking for that malevolent part of the story that would sickly spice things up for me.  The affair, the overdose, all of it satisfied my needs much more than the beautiful happy ending in A.

“That’s about all that can be said for plots, which anyway are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.  Now try How and Why”.  I took that statement to heart in all of its truthfulness.  Everyone as their own individual being has the opportunity of making the “right” choices at a chance to be in forever happiness.  Does that happen all the time?  No.  And the answer is “Why” does that not happen?  And “How” do we let happiness slip away from our fingers like that? 

            My interpretation of this story was that the very answers to both of my questions revolve back around to us.  Because just as I was searching unknowingly for something bad to happen to make this story my definition of a good story, I, along as others in this world, do that within my own life.  Countless amount of times have there been issues that were so small and minuet that shouldn’t have mattered and yet I let it ruin the entire day for me.  And so I pose a question going beyond the reading, are we born imperfect, or do we choose to be it?  That’s what I think the author was trying to indirectly convey.