Entry Six: Atwood

Happy Endings
Margaret Atwood (1983)

“You’ll have to face it, the endings are the same however you slice it. Don’t be deluded by any other endings, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality. The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die. John and Mary die. John and Mary die.”

I know nothing of Margaret Atwood, other than the fact she and Douglas Adams should get coffee, because their writings seem very similar to me. Perhaps it’s my dry sense of humor, and works by both of the aforementioned authors seem to utilize that same use of sarcasm that I’ve come to admire. Also, they’re both very intelligent, and give a very new perspective on the daily things that appear in peoples lives (if you count hitchhiking on Vogon ships with a bath towel a daily event, that is).

In the case of Happy Endings, it’s a very dry and straightforward story. It depicts John and Mary as the American Dream couple – they fall in love, get married, have children, own a home, and die happy. This, of course, is far from a realistic expectation for anyone’s life, because life is never that simple.

Which is why extensions B, C, D, E, and F come into play.

With each addition, the story is warped; Mary and John don’t fall in love completely, and John turns out to be using her for sex and nothing more. Or one is older than the other, and one is pining over someone else. It adds a very stark contrast in content for these stories; you start off with a dream family, and slowly add layers upon layers of reality, which seem to make the outcome of marriage not as important or as realistic a goal as it once was.

Something I really like about this story is the fact everything said is cold, hard fact; there are people who are going through relationships just like this everywhere and every day. There are office women who fall for bad boys and businessmen who sleep around because their marriage isn’t satisfying anymore. When Atwood says that plots “are just one thing after another”, alluding to the fact that life is really just one thing after another thing. Perhaps they aren’t entirely worth changing or challenging, because in the end more things are going to happen after this one bad thing to begin with.

In addition, the distanced and almost dismissive attitude in which these character’s stories are told is intriguing to me. Atwood shows almost no emotional connection to these characters; their story is nothing much more than a news report. That kind of emotional distancing is very common in our modern day and age, and maybe it’s a reason why so many relationships end in ways that the author depicts.

And, in the end, we all do just die anyway. So maybe we shouldn’t care as much.