Reading Ruminations: Bitter Endings and Hopelessness

There’s something about reading a book with a bitter end that leaves one feeling empty.  I’m often left with a sense of slight annoyance with the lack of resolution at a book’s end, but it’s rarer that the story ends and I’m left with a sense of actual loss. 

With most books I come to resonate with at least a few of the characters, after all, that’s a large part of what makes for a gripping story, so it’s understandable that I feel a bit broken as things crumble down around those characters.  Emotion, true emotion, is something that every story needs. No one will connect with it if there is nothing with which to connect.  With that in mind, I realize that there must be heartbreak and pain in characters’ lives.  They have no depth if they experience no suffering.  That is not to say that all their suffering should be uniform.  It is not so in reality, so it follows that the same concept would apply in alternate realities.  Still, it is disheartening when characters, people, you’ve come to love, end their stories in heartbreak and hopelessness.  As someone who often reads to escape reality, that is one aspect of the real world that I would just as soon banish from the others.  

         I think it’s really the hopelessness that gets me.  I can deal with people suffering loss, but when they give up on their lives, regardless of whether they are suicidal or not, I have a hard time dealing with it.  For me, I choose to believe in the greatness of the soul that allows people, fictional or not, to rise from the ashes of their circumstances and create something new.  Therefore it saddens and pains me when this is not the case, even in fiction.