Another Ambiguous Ending

After reading The Handmaid's Tale and Song of Solomon with my AP students, I should be used to ambiguous endings. And as I neared the end of On Such a Full Sea, I knew that I was most likely in for another one. Unless some deux ex machina (god from the machine) appeared to tie up all the loose threads of the story, there was no way I would get the closure I wanted (though I did get some).

And what did I want closure about?

1.  What happens to Reg? Would he and Fan be reunited?  

Turns out he has been captured by the drug companies, seeking to discover if he's C-free and has the secret to curing the residents of the charter cities, or perhaps ensuring that they can't be cured, so that they have to keep paying outrageous amounts for their treatments.  Cynical, yes, but the book gives a pretty cynical perspective of capitalism, or industry, of human nature.

 2.  Who is the "we"? and do the residents of B-Mor ever rebel against the power of the charter cities? against the prescribed and contained lives they live? 


While I never found out the specifics of the narration, the "we" tells us that "The act and moment are gone" (390). While there was movement toward an overthrow of the normal order, much like John's attempt to throw out all the soma in Brave New World, it all ends with a whimper.  There is no bang, no overthrow. Instead people return to the "typical habit of [their] lives..." and the rebellions seems "like a dream, irrepresibly vivid and captivating when it was happening but now nearly impossible to remember..." (390).  
 
[Interestingly, this last quote very nearly describes my experience with the novel as a whole. I finished it a week and a half ago, and while I enjoyed the reading of it and found aspects of it very powerful, it is not a novel that has left a lasting mark.]

And why do they submit so easily to the way things used to be?  Because those in power, the directorate, "has reversed some of the more disheartening measures of recent times" (389).  The status quo, the comfort zone, has been returned to the people of B-Mor, and so they fall back into their old ways. Familiarity, tradition, routine: all of these are immensely compforting and make change incredibly difficult, in the novel and in our own lives. 
 

3.   And, of course, I want to know what happens to Fan. 

Fan, who has somehow influenced every person she's met without, for the most part, being impacted in return. Fan, months pregnant now, with no one really the wiser.  Fan, who wanders around in search of Reg, then in search of a long-lost brother she's never met, whom she ends up meeting in the charter city she winds up in, who takes her in and is inspired to re-create his B-Mor life, who promises to help her find Reg.

Of course, things do not turn out as she, or her brother, or the reader, intends.  Once again, Lee throws at us both the horrors and the heroism of human nature. From the beginning of the book to the end, Lee has created complex, flawed characters, characters who repel us with their cruelty and those who draw us in due to their kindness. And so it is in life too. One only has to watch the news to see what horrific things people are capable of, but we know too that is only part of the story.


These thematic ideas speak to me, as they have in other novels, because I am fascinated by this aspect of people, by what makes them do the things they do. I am no different from most, just trying to come to terms with the big questions, the biggest of all being "why."


While literature gives me answers to these questions, I can't come to terms with all of the answers, can't fathom some of them.

 I have, however, come to terms with that group narrator-a Greek chorus of sorts that speaks to us about our strengths, our follies, that forces us to not only follow the characters of the novel but to also look inward, at our own tendencies.