The Great Gatsby by F Scott
Fitzgerald
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into
the past."
Fitzgerald hypnotises successive generations of
readers with this tale. Nick Carraway's signing off after the death of Gatsby is
my favourite last line in the Anglo-American tradition – resonant, memorable and
profound. It hovers between poetry and the vernacular and is the magnificent
chord, in a minor key, which brings this 20th-century masterpiece to a close.
Somehow, it sums up the novel completely, in tone as much as meaning, while
giving the reader a way out into the drabber, duller world of everyday
reality.
Ulysses by James Joyce
"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like
the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under
the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me
would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes
and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his
heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Joyce
is the master of the closing line and this is his most famous and most
suggestive. Compare it with the end of The Dead, his short story that
concludes Dubliners: "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow
falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of
their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
Middlemarch by George
Eliot
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably
diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric
acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is
half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in
unvisited tombs."
Middlemarch is many readers' favourite Eliot novel,
with so many quotable passages. This passage is almost a credo – a lovely,
valedictory celebration of Dorothea's quiet life, after she has renounced
Casaubon's fortune and confessed her love for Ladislaw.
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
"The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil
waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an
overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense
darkness."
Conrad's merciless short novel (fewer than 40,000
words) opens on the Thames and ends there, too. The last line of Marlowe's
astounding confession is an admission of his complicity in the terrible events
he has just described as a reluctant witness. It also executes a highly
effective narrative diminuendo in an extraordinary fictional nightmare. Compare
George Orwell's chilling return to the status quo in another nightmare,
Nineteen Eighty Four: "He loved Big Brother."
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
"But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,
because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it.
I been there before."
This is a heartbreaker. Twain rounds off his
masterpiece by saying that Huck Finn is fated, like all Americans, to an
incessant quest for the challenge of the frontier. For sheer teenage
disaffection, it's matched by the last line of Catcher in the Rye:
"Don't tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." And also
from the US, let's not forget Margaret Mitchell's ending to Gone With the
Wind: "After all, tomorrow is another day." Pure hokum, like the novel.
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
"Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had
my vision."
And she has. Lily's closing words complete the circle of
consciousness. Virginia Woolf was good at last lines and was always a decisive
closer. Mrs Dalloway, whose first line famously has Woolf's protagonist
buying the flowers herself, ends with: "It is Clarissa, he said. For there she
was." That's the perfect conclusion, to a nervy climax, nailed in nine
words.
Catch-22 by Joseph
Heller
"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."
The spirit of Bugs Bunny inspires the finale of Yossarian's adventures
with 256th Squadron. It's the moment in which Yossarian, who has been in thrall
to Catch-22 throughout, finally breaks away. Yossarian has come to realise that
Catch-22 does not actually exist, but because the powers that be claim it does,
and the world believes it does, it nevertheless has potent effects. Indeed,
because it does not exist, there is no way it can be repealed, undone,
overthrown, or denounced. But here, finally, he can become free.
Speak Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
"There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and
the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as
pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady's bicycle
and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most
satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid
ship's funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled
picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it
has been seen."
A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and
reality. Contrast the incoherent end of William Burroughs's Naked
Lunch, "No got … C'lom Fliday."
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront?
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths
fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing
through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers
for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
Bront?'s masterpiece is
often cited for its gothic morbidity and intoxicating romantic darkness, but
here – stepping back from the tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine – the novel
displays an acute evocation of Yorkshire combined with memorable poetic
grandeur. This note of redemption promises a better future in the union of Cathy
and Hareton.
The Tale of Samuel Whiskers by Beatrix Potter
"But Tom Kitten has always been afraid of a rat; he never durst face
anything bigger than – A Mouse."
Children's books should not be
overlooked. Potter earns her slot with this chilling, but playful, ending to a
spine-tingler by a writer who loved to explore the world of juvenile suspense.
Perhaps in honour of the late Maurice Sendak we should also mention "And it was
still warm", the payoff to Where the Wild Things Are. And JK Rowling
has a well-earned closer to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: "The
scar had not pained Harry for 19 years. All was well."
