Abstract
John and Mary have met and there are different options you can read to end they story. One ending is that they both have good jobs and a beautiful house. They have two children and they travel with them. Eventually John and Mary grow old and die. The second ending is that Mary loved John, but John didn't love her. He used her for food and sex. Eventually Mary knows he's seeing another women and she kills herself. John gets married to the other woman Madge. The third ending is that Mary feels bad for John and so she stays with him although he has a wife. Mary is seeing a guy named James. One day John comes into Mary's apartment and finds James and Mary in her bed. This makes John mad so he goes out and buys a gun and kills them both and himself. His wife Madge mourns, but ends up marrying Fred. The fourth ending or D is about Madge and Fred. They survive and tidal wave and continue their life through the first ending stated above. The fifth ending is Fred and Madge and Fred dies of heart trouble so Madge devotes her life to charity work. The last ending or F is that Mary is a spy spying on other spies and John is a revolutionary in Canada and they continue on with ending A or one. In the end it comes down to however the story goes John and Mary will still die and that's truly the end.
Response
When I started to read this story I was expecting to have a few endings to a story and they'd all be happy and fun to read. This was my initial thought because the story is titled, "Happy Endings". I was hoping to read about fairy tales with a princess and a prince. That is definitely not what I ended up reading. This whole story is based on the words happy and ending. When you think of happy you think of a good family with riches to share and the couple who are in love. The word ending just means the end of someone's life, which is death.
As the options arise you find out that the two people you started with John and Mary, and you read different scenarios on how they live their live and how they're going to die. The main point here is that they are both going to die at some point, which the title explains when it says "endings". This is what Margaret Atwood is trying to convey throughout this whole reading John and Mary die; she even states it at the end of the story after option F.
Everyone is going to have an end to their life and that's death. It's the way you go about your death that defines it as being a sad or happy ending. While the whole time I'm thinking of unrealistic stories in which the ending of their life is based on the events prior to death. I never stopped to think that the ending to your life really isn't happy at all because you are leaving the world you have gotten to know so well to go to an unknown place that you're not familiar with at all. I think this whole story in a way was a play on words. It takes that thoughts you were thinking and totally destroys them. The title is completely morphed and becomes meaningless the more options that you read through the more it becomes apparent that endings will never be happy no matted what journey you take.
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