critical response#3

I really enjoyed reading “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood, the format that she used, the characters that she reused and the different “endings” that the characters ended up following kept me guessing at what was going to happen next. What really interested me was how the story changed within each ending option. She varied the ages and motives of the different characters and completely changed the dynamics of the story which was interesting to see, most of the changes came from aging, thus it was as if the reader was following John, Mary, Madge, James and Fred throughout their lives and seeing how things intertwined.

What I found to be ironic was that John, as a young man strung along a young Mary while he also dated Marge and then he is married to Marge he later seeks an affair with another woman, also named Mary, and when he finds out that she is cheating on him and kills her, her lover and himself. The man of infidelity can’t bear living in a world where he isn’t the only unfaithful one.

In the end of her story, Atwood says that the ultimate ending to every story is death; all other endings are fake. Some have more optimistic endings, some have intentionally deceptive endings, and some have endings that are left up for interpretation, but ultimately the ending is death.