Kelly Hanken
Critical Response #3
Atwoods, “Happy Endings”
“Happy Endings” is a great story that analyzes itself, as well as other stories of its ilk. The concept of the “happy ending” is always prevalent in most fiction, and the story does a good job of giving a nod to the truth of the matter – everyone dies in the end. The best part about Atwoods’ story is that it presents this truth in several different ways, all with a bit of grim humor. Though the characters are very plain – you don’t know the physical description of any of them – you can still see them walking around in your head.
I especially enjoyed the almost “choose-your-own-story” quality to how it was set up. You could pick any of the answers, but they’d all come back to A, and eventually to the final outcome: death. It also does a good job of showing how transparent and fake a plot seems – most of the answers bordered on soap opera melodrama – until you add more detail. Without a narrative (all of the choices are 3rd person omnipotent), the stories feel trite and boring. This is something that the story picks at, pointing out that plots “are just one thing after another, a what and a what and a what.”
The urging to figure out the How’s and Why’s of the choices is what really sells the story’s ending.
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