Response to “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood

This is an interesting fiction written by Atwood with very creative writing techniques. It contains six different short pieces of stories labeled from A to F which all related to the protagonists John and Mary, and all the stories finally return to the same ending as the story A.

Except the structure, the main idea this fiction tells about is “happy ending.” However, from the contents, we can find every piece of story is end with death. This is kind of weird to call “death” a happy ending, but I think this is not what the author real wants to express since she puts a quotation mark to the title, it is however to suggest her satire to the happy ending of other fictions. As she writes in the conclusion, the only authentic ending is “John and Mary die. John and Mary die.” Therefore, it is more important to pay attention to the description of reasons, which is “how and why” the things happen that lead to the ending, rather than simply tells the plots which is “a what and a what and a what.” The author also proves this idea in this fiction. We can find that all the following stories are more interesting than the A story, since they all tell with detailed description about the reasons that cause the end of death, which shows the importance of “how and why” to a “happy ending”.