Last week, I wrote a bit about the differences between traditional mysteries and inverted mysteries. I realized when I finished that post that I had more to say on the subject, so this week I wanted to talk a bit about the endings of mysteries and how sometimes there isn’t a convenient ending for some stories. Although I’ve read and enjoyed many books that have conclusive endings, I tend to prefer open-ended stories that leave me with plenty to think about after I’ve closed the book.
Having both read and written such stories, I know full well that they can frustrate some readers. Most mystery fiction operates on what we call a contract with the reader, meaning that first, you will be confused, then you will be satisfied. The mystery is resolved, the loose ends are tied up, the detective standing in the drawing room names the killer, and the case is over. The world was disturbed but order has been restored.
This contract is so deeply embedded in our expectations for mysteries that we carry it into stories that never actually agreed to it. Hey world! such stories might say. That’s not the kind of story I am! If a story is posed as a mystery, we tend to make assumptions about its elements and we’re disappointed when those elements aren’t there.
What Makes a Mystery Feel Unresolved?
The easy critique of an unresolved mystery is that it’s not actually a mystery. The writer raised a question they couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. This goes back to my post last week about the differences between traditional and inverted mysteries. Rather than failing to conclude, some stories simply offer a different kind of conclusion.
This is why inverted mysteries are called whydunnits instead of whodunnits. What stays mysterious is why someone did what they did, who a person really was beneath the surface they showed the world, or what actually passed between two people in a room with no witnesses. Life, as we all know, is sometimes unsolvable. Problems, questions, or concerns that we want answers for sometimes cannot be answered. Often, the unsolvable mysteries in fiction tend to be the same ones that are unsolvable in life.
Why Certain Stories Linger After the Ending
Some stories use unresolved mystery as their primary way of creating a character. There are so many great novels that are organized around trying to understand a person who is beneath the surface. Going back to my example from last week, the narrator of Rebecca spends an entire novel trying to understand the first Mrs. de Winter. Through the end of the novel, Rebecca remains unknowable because we see her only through the eyes of others. Instead of making the character of Rebecca clear, du Maurier shows us that some people can never be understood.
A solved mystery, no matter how dark the elements are, can feel reassuring. The monster has a name, an origin, or a motive, and the threat to the order of things has been contained. In a sense, when we understand something, we can control it, or at least we feel as if we can.
The story has brought you close enough to the truth that the final moments where the mystery remains unsolved feel significant. As the reader, you should be able to articulate, even if only vaguely, why this particular thing can’t be known. What is it about the subject, or the searcher, or the world of the story, that makes resolution impossible rather than just withheld? The best unresolved mysteries feel like a door that was slammed in your face when you least expected it. You know there’s a room on the other side of that door, and you can hear someone moving around inside it. But when you turn the knob, the door is locked and there’s no way in. There’s no way to get at the final moments where everything might become clear.
The Psychology of Uncertainty in Fiction
In real life, people are not solvable, no matter how much we wish they were. In real life, relationships don’t always explain themselves because we can never truly know what is going on inside the head of another person. We also know that grief can’t always be resolved or even understood. Sometimes our emotions just fade away, leaving everything exactly where it was in the first place. Real life is full of things that happened that we cannot explain.
Fiction that insists on explanations or the satisfying click of all of the pieces placed in the puzzle is making a kind of argument about reality that can be hard to go along with for some readers, myself included. Many readers love HEA (Happily Ever After) endings. While I appreciate HEAs, I can’t claim that my favorite novels actually have them. As a writer, some of my books do end with Happily Ever Afters, but not all of my books do. As Orson Welles said, “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” I’ve used the example before of a story ending at the moment of a couple’s greatest happiness, conveniently leaving out the fact that a week later they’re arguing because he keeps leaving his socks on the floor. Life isn’t always clear or easy, and most of us carry around several unsolved mysteries because of people we didn’t understand (maybe it was ourselves that we didn’t understand) or choices we made that don’t quite make sense.
Open-ended mysteries still offer a contract to the reader, but it’s a different kind of contract than the one classic mystery fiction offers. It asks more of the reader because it asks the reader to become an active participant in the story with their own ideas, opinions, questions, and conclusions. Perhaps some doors are meant to remain slightly ajar instead of completely closed and the story’s job is simply to show us that the door is there to peek through and contemplate if we wish.