I will admit it, I sometimes shed a tear at the end of movies or books. For instance I always get watery eyes at the end of Bravehart.
That being said I just finished reading Les Miserables last night and I spent over half an hour wailing and still when I even look (not even reading) at some of those final paragraphs I start to cry again.
Why is that? Why was this book so powerful to me? And most importantly how can we as writers duplicate that in our readers? Now I know my reading of that book is probably not typical, but still a dissection of that ending would be invaluable in my opinion.
So where to begin? I would say first read the book (unabridged please) because I'm sure that there will be spoilers here.
I guess the most obvious thing would be the character Jean Valjean dies. That's the climax of the book. (Another good point in novel writing...1462 pages to the climax, 1 page for the conclusion) We have seen this character go through a lot. He has sacrificed himself for countless individuals and has been an all around good guy. He's not perfect though which adds to his humanity, and so when good people die it is sad. But this I don't think was the reason for this beautiful ending...there's something more.
One of his final words is "I die happy." which was also a very significant thing. Throughout the book he had been happy before, but it was always under another name. M. Madeleine and M. Fauchelevent where some of the names he used when he was happy, but Jean Valjean was never happy. As soon as he revealed himself to Marius and became once more Jean, he was miserable and further more he continued to sink into misery reaching an absolute low point a couple pages before the end. Then he rocketed upwards in his happiness and then died. So perhaps a large part of the emotional end was the fact that if you were to graph (physicists love graphs) his happiness you would see this downward sloping graph and then turning around almost with a sharp point going nearly straight up. This might be a formula for an emotional end.
Another interesting thing is that Jean is not a tragic hero (in my opinion) as he never realized his flaw in not taking any credit or comfort in his vast list of good deeds, but he always takes full credit for his past. He refuses Marius' offer of a pardon. Even at the end this is symbolized by his last action which is holding up a crucifix shouting "Behold the great martyr.". He does not realize that he is good and dies before he figures that out. He states right before he dies that he doesn't know if the bishop is pleased with how he lived his life when he lived the life of a saint! That was absolutely tragic that he was not a tragic hero.
Then there was the symbolism of the candlesticks which cast this light over him only after he died. It emphasized the point I made in the above paragraph about how he never felt himself good enough. Also earlier in the scene we finally see what he kept hidden away, and that was Cosette's mourning clothes. I don't know what exactly they meant but they hit me pretty hard.
So what lessons can be learned from this? Well having a huge sad-happy swing on the last page with lots of tragedy and symbolism apparently works. That and having 1400 pages to develop a character...
I'd like to hear other takes on this as well, and if anybody else had a similar response to this ending as me.
That being said I just finished reading Les Miserables last night and I spent over half an hour wailing and still when I even look (not even reading) at some of those final paragraphs I start to cry again.
Why is that? Why was this book so powerful to me? And most importantly how can we as writers duplicate that in our readers? Now I know my reading of that book is probably not typical, but still a dissection of that ending would be invaluable in my opinion.
So where to begin? I would say first read the book (unabridged please) because I'm sure that there will be spoilers here.
I guess the most obvious thing would be the character Jean Valjean dies. That's the climax of the book. (Another good point in novel writing...1462 pages to the climax, 1 page for the conclusion) We have seen this character go through a lot. He has sacrificed himself for countless individuals and has been an all around good guy. He's not perfect though which adds to his humanity, and so when good people die it is sad. But this I don't think was the reason for this beautiful ending...there's something more.
One of his final words is "I die happy." which was also a very significant thing. Throughout the book he had been happy before, but it was always under another name. M. Madeleine and M. Fauchelevent where some of the names he used when he was happy, but Jean Valjean was never happy. As soon as he revealed himself to Marius and became once more Jean, he was miserable and further more he continued to sink into misery reaching an absolute low point a couple pages before the end. Then he rocketed upwards in his happiness and then died. So perhaps a large part of the emotional end was the fact that if you were to graph (physicists love graphs) his happiness you would see this downward sloping graph and then turning around almost with a sharp point going nearly straight up. This might be a formula for an emotional end.
Another interesting thing is that Jean is not a tragic hero (in my opinion) as he never realized his flaw in not taking any credit or comfort in his vast list of good deeds, but he always takes full credit for his past. He refuses Marius' offer of a pardon. Even at the end this is symbolized by his last action which is holding up a crucifix shouting "Behold the great martyr.". He does not realize that he is good and dies before he figures that out. He states right before he dies that he doesn't know if the bishop is pleased with how he lived his life when he lived the life of a saint! That was absolutely tragic that he was not a tragic hero.
Then there was the symbolism of the candlesticks which cast this light over him only after he died. It emphasized the point I made in the above paragraph about how he never felt himself good enough. Also earlier in the scene we finally see what he kept hidden away, and that was Cosette's mourning clothes. I don't know what exactly they meant but they hit me pretty hard.
So what lessons can be learned from this? Well having a huge sad-happy swing on the last page with lots of tragedy and symbolism apparently works. That and having 1400 pages to develop a character...
I'd like to hear other takes on this as well, and if anybody else had a similar response to this ending as me.
