Marriage is another foundational plot element to all of the stories that Atwood introduces. Whether describing a lovelorn heroine or a love triangle with a violent end, these plots rely on the same tropes and stereotypes, rendering them, for Atwood, deeply boring stories. Scenario B and C interject tragedy into the plot-they are not simply “happy endings.” However, they, too, follow a formulaic pattern, and all ultimately arrive at scenario A. One could literally swap the names of the characters from other scenarios into it without meaningfully changing any of the broad plot strokes. Atwood argues that the ubiquity of this ending renders it virtually meaningless-it is uninteresting precisely because of its generic character. What happens next?” Scenario A, which establishes the default ending of many of the other subsequent scenarios as well, offers a “happy ending” to the initial romance. This is the first building block of the plot of all the stories-as Atwood puts it “ John and Mary meet. The various iterations of the stories all start with an initial romance, whether explicit or implied. In doing so, Atwood asserts that the broad strokes of a life-who sleeps with whom, who marries whom, who dies and how-as less interesting than the day to day trials and motivations of characters, or as she puts it, the “How and Why.” “Happy Endings” details the broad plot arcs of a variety of different stories, poking fun at the traditional structure that underpins so many of them. I’m taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s My Friend Alex a.Beyond illustrating the problematic dynamics underpinning sexual and romantic relationships, “Happy Endings” is concerned with the nature of storytelling itself. This leaves us with a beginning, again hard to play with but the plot holds the potential to go beyond ‘ a what and a what and a what’.Ītwood ends the story with an exercise for the readers which is to try the How and Why of the stories. The premise of ‘ Happy Endings’ questions this very fact, is there a certainty of happily ever after? For anything other than death is a false end but we want to believe in a fairytale-ish ending. The classic beginning to a story is ‘ Once Upon a Time’ that must lead you to a place called ‘ And they lived happily ever after’. Of course, you barely get a paragraph of each plot and nothing more! The last one is my favourite, in this version you have a revolutionary and a spy. And the fifth version is about terminal illness. When we reach the fourth version, the plot is about two characters and a natural disaster. The third story has three characters from the prior story and a convoluted love story with one more character. The happy life story of version A is disturbed by revealing the mean traits of one character. The next story has the same two characters and an additional one but with a different setting. Their story is made up of the usual things, and they live an ordinary life with a happily ever after scenario. In ‘ Happy Endings’, there are six different plots in repetitive structure. This skeleton needs the meat of ‘How’ and ‘Why’ to make the story juicy and appealing to the readers. Most of the times, the plot serves ‘What’ in a story. As writers, we believe in creating spectacular openings for our work – whether a novel or a short story. This experimental story gave me a perspective. I stumbled upon this short story a couple of years back when I was stuck inside the Writer’s block. She wrote this story two years before ‘ The Handmaid’s Tale’. ‘Happy Endings’ is a short story by Margaret Atwood. Are we interested in this story? Perhaps yes, if there is an interesting spin to the HOW and WHY part of WHAT happened in their lives. The usual life story is about ticking the boxes on birth, education, profession, marriage, children, and retirement. Ordinary lives are mundane without the pizzazz of a thriller/ romance/ tragedy/ horror and unforeseeable twists and turns.
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