The Most Unexpected Final Lines in Literary History

If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, by Italo Calvino
Perhaps the most confusing novel ever written, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler is literally about you—the reader—trying to read a book called If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Each odd-numbered chapter discusses your approach to reading the book, including the fact that you keep getting interrupted by other novels, and each even-numbered chapter is the first chapter of those other novels. A puzzle in book form, you might think that at the end of the mammoth struggle to read this book you would be rewarded. Instead, the final line mocks you: And you say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.” MIND. BLOWN.

“The Nine Billion Names of God,” by Arthur C. Clarke
A classic short story by one of the old masters, telling the story of Tibetan Monks who believe that once they learn all nine billion names of god, the purpose of the universe will have been met, and it will end. The monks rent a massive mainframe computer and hire two men to help them install it and run their name-generating program. The technicians are worried that when the program ends and nothing happens they will be blamed for incompetence or malfeasance, so they leave just before the end of the program, riding ponies down the mountain trails towards the airport. The final line, as they pause to look at the sky on their way, is surprising because Clark does an excellent job of aligning the reader with his skeptical characters: Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace
Wallace loved to play games in his writing, to subvert and surprise and ignore old rules. This novel was Wallace’s first published book, and is obsessed with words and their power to define us. The story of a young woman dealing with several personal crises of various dimensions while she questions her own sanity and sense of reality, the book is written in a variety of styles and techniques used to create a sympathetic sense of unreality in the reader, and concludes with an unfinished line that is stunning in its perfection: “You can trust me,” R.V. said, watching her hand. “I’m a man of my”. Wallace trolls us with a final line that searches for—what else—a word. But what word? You might think it’s obvious, but then you haven’t been paying attention. You can come up with an infinite list of possibles, and all are equally right.

The Castle, by Franz Kafka
Another novel that ends mid-sentence—though this time it’s unexpected for a very practical reason: Kafka, after dithering on whether he liked this novel or would ever complete it, died before he could make a definitive decision. As a result, the final line is haunting in its own way: She held out her trembling hand to K. and had him sit down beside her, she spoke with great difficulty, it was difficult to understand her, but what she said. Reading the novel you forget that Kafka died, that the book is unfinished, and the final line somehow seems to fit, to be purposeful and perfectly in step with the themes of the story—a search for salvation, and a quest to navigate and survive an awful bureaucracy, both missions that could end suddenly in death.

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish“, by J.D. Salinger
Salinger’s first story featuring the Glass family is one of the few that ends with (er, 60-year-old spoiler alert) a sudden and unexpected suicide but actually makes it work, instead of coming off like a hacky way of ending a story with a thunderbolt. Although it has since inspired a million bad writers to introduce suicide as a way of goosing up the drama of their work, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” is brilliant because it makes perfect sense once you go back and think about the story itself, in which clues are littered about in subtle ways, and Seymour’s languid, seemingly peaceful behavior creates a tension you were only aware of subconsciously. The last line, Then he went over and sat down on the unoccupied twin bed, looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple, shocks and dismays, and stays with you for the rest of your life.
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