Margaret Atwood Happy Endings

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In the story “Happy Endings” by Margaret Atwood there is six different scenarios of how life is suppose to turn out to be. Part A is the fairy tale ending everyone dreams of having, while B-F are obstacles people tend to face during life. Atwood’s choose-your-own-adventure style plot structure in her short story “Happy Endings” highlights her nihilistic worldview. For Atwood, all plots lead towards death. No matter what course of action one chooses in her story (and in life), the end is inevitable. Through this structure, not only does it show her pessimism for the women characters in her story but also commenting on the objectification of women in society. Atwood reveal her pessimistic view on life and death, but she demonstrates the role that expectations and their letdowns play in their lives meanwhile her view in women is meaningless …show more content…
But life often does not work that way, and are “deluded...by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality” (Atwood 15). As the reader grows more mature, she begins to question this idea of a perfect, happy ending. She’s experienced in her own life some tragedy and hardship and begins to recognize the conflict between the fairy-tales that she has read as a child and the reality that she faces as an adult. In her “Critical Essay on ‘Happy Endings,’” April Scheiner explains that Atwood challenges the belief “that a simple unexplained but happy conclusion is all the reader needs” (Scheiner 1). Not only is a happy ending simplistic and unsatisfying in that the conflicts of life are always completely resolved (or that there are no conflicts to begin with, as in Section A of “Happy Endings”), but it doesn’t reflect reality. The only thing that happy endings give to the reader is a false sense of hope. A poor reader will be confused when their own life is not without conflict. A good reader will understand that happy endings are a writing convention, not a life
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