Last Lines in Novels
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: “I am haunted by humans.”
Eerie and haunting, this last line capitalizes on what could have otherwise could have been a creative, thinly layered narrative device. Death itself narrates a story of a Nazi youth hiding a Jew in the basement with her sympathetic parents. It is a sad story, a popular one for high school reading lists, but I thought this last line helped the book as a whole.
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
I have more appreciation for this book and its finale every time I read it. I don’t know but the Instagram, Tik Tok craze of everyone trying to be the center of attention reminds me of the excess of the 1920s. Daisy Buchannan and the American Dream, both are equally unattainable. Gatsby and America are trapped in the past, yearning for when things were great, thinking life/America could be “great again”. Both are stuck beating against an oncoming current of change.
The Giver by Lois Lowry: “Behind him, across vast distances of space and time, from the place he had left, he thought he heard music too. But perhaps it was only an echo.”
This one is a personal favorite. In third or fourth grade, The Giver was one of the earliest books I read with such an ambiguous ending. Jonas escapes his world void of memory. Does he live, die, and save the child? Is the music he hears coming from heaven or have things been changed by his actions? I learned how much I love it when you don’t know what happened.
*Don’t watch the movie*
Harry Potter by JK Rowling: “The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.”
Anyone who grew up reading the books, standing in line for midnight premiers, playing video games, and dreaming of receiving their Hogwarts letter knows that there is Inside Out core memory associated with reading Deathly Hallows for the first time. Everyone had their theories about Horcruxes, Neville, who would kill Voldemort, and which of the main three would die. Reading the epilogue, much like watching its film rendition, was emotional.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy: “Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
The Road was my introduction to one of my favorite authors. The post-apocalyptic story has been told, re-told, and overdone again. McCarthy develops tackles it with his brilliant, poetic, dark neo-western talent. Instead of a last line, I could quote the last pages. It is painfully beautiful and melancholy.
