Atwood's Unhappy Endings
will always be some outside force that threatens to tear them apart. A love story can be boring without any conflict, so if the couple has no problems with each other, then an outside source must provide one. Outside conflicts always happen to people in real life, and have for a long time in stories as well. This version is important because Atwood confronts the fact that relationships themselves take a lot of work, whether in good times or bad.
Bad things happen to good people in version E, where the boy and girl are two wonderful folks but the boy still gets sick and dies. His conflict is as internal as it gets when he suffers from heart disease, and there is nothing anyone can do to save him. His good wife continues on, but the couple is no more. This version of a heartbreaking love story is a classic, and Atwood simplifies it by making the boy and girl great characters, so that when something bad happens to them the reader will feel sympathetic. The death of the boy in this scenario is actually necessary, because without his death you would just have a love story with no conflict. In addition, by making these characters lovable, the writer insures that the reader will want them to be happy. The death of the boy in the story is the conflict, and thus makes it impossible to have a happy ending.
The best version of all is F, because Atwood lets us know that just in case we feel that the previous versions were a little too “bourgeois,” conventional or middle class, then we can spice things up a bit and make the boy “a revolutionary” and the girl “a counterespionage agent and see how far that gets you.” By this statement Margaret Atwood is telling the reader that it does not matter where a story is set. Nor does it matter who the characters are or what they are fighting for. A story will always end in death, even if it is not written into the story. So, if by making these characters into a revolutionary and a spy it makes the reader more excited about the story that is fine, but Atwood states that it is only dress up meant to entertain the reader, and “Happy Endings,” creates a shortcut for all to see the real point of most of these stories. She goes on to write, “”The only authentic ending is the one provided here: John and Mary die.
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