The End: Conclusion or Confusion?

Abstract

The last chapter is controversial. Is this a happy ending? Or is it a happy ending symbolically but not realistically, or the other way round? Does the end balance some achievements with some limitations?

Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This is because the plot requires to be wound up. (E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, pp. 93–4)

Forster achieves at the last, not proportion, but the halfway meeting of opposites that Margaret deplores … The solution is, at the best, unsteady, at the worst, facile. (Alan Wilde, 1964, p. 123)

The novel, like the symphony, ends in joyous splendor — and for the same reason. Forster chooses to make all right in the end. But the goblins are there. Panic and emptiness, squalor and tragedy — they may return, indeed, they will. And they have a place in the splendor and triumph. (George H. Thomson, 1967, p. 198)