happy endings margaret atwood discussion questions

But even as she renders the familiar world disturbingly unfamiliar, Atwood speaks directly to her reader, drawing him in with a plainspoken, even conversational style peppered with “yous” that seems to border on second person narration.

Good Bones and Simple Murder, a collections of very short stories, prose poems, and illustrations, is no less unsettling, even as she tackles themes that recur in her other works: here, Atwood takes stock of everything from common fairy tales and folk songs, to traditional gender roles and sexual exploitation, to alien encounters, to death scenes and murder scenes to Raymond Chandler’s furniture preferences. In books like The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood takes stock of the present state of the world and extrapolates into the future, presenting a portent of disturbing things to come. Atwood deals with the possibilities of the world, the terrifying possibilities, and loves them: embraces them, holds them out for all to see, and asks her readers to consider how those possibilities came to be. In the last analysis, ‘Happy Endings’ is a kind of postmodern story about stories: postmodern because it freely and self-consciously announces itself as metafiction, as being more interested in how stories work than in telling a story itself.īut within the narratives Atwood presents to us, she also addresses some of the inequalities between men and women, and exposes how relationships are rarely a level playing field for the two sexes.Margaret Atwood is the kind of writer who pays very close attention to the world, observing the banal and the comfortable, and writing about it in such a way as to expose what makes the everyday of the Western world really weird and uncomfortable. A woman motorcycling across America on her own would not feel as safe, for one, as a man doing so.) (It is not that she isn’t free herself – she is, after all, carrying on an affair with a married, older man even though society wouldn’t exactly view that kindly – but her freedoms are of a different kind. Relationships are not equal in a society where men have things easier than women, and the third of Atwood’s six scenarios, in which Mary is the key player, makes this point plainly.įreedom, Atwood tells us, isn’t the same for girls as it is for boys, and while James is off on his motorcycle, she is forced by societal expectations to do other things. Of course, as so often in Margaret Atwood’s fiction, there’s a feminist angle to all this. Character motivation is more important than what they do or what is done to them. After all, do they? Perhaps the more important details are, as the closing paragraphs of ‘Happy Endings’ have it, not What but How and Why. By the time we get to the fifth plot, ‘E’, the narrator is happily encouraging us to view the plot details as interchangeable between Fred and Madge, as if they don’t really matter. Boy meets girl, girl falls in love with boy, and after various rocky patches they end up living, in the immortal words, ‘happily ever after’.Ītwood wants to put such plot lines under the microscope, as it were, and subject them to closer scrutiny. It’s a commonplace that happy endings in romantic novels ‘sell’: it gives readers what they want.

Why does Atwood do this? Partly, one suspects, because she wishes to interrogate both the nature of romantic plots in fiction and readers’ attitudes towards them. But as the story develops, the author breaks in on her characters more and more, ‘breaking the fourth wall’ to remind us that they are mere ciphers and that the things being described do not exist outside of the author’s own head (and the reader’s: Atwood’s fiction, and especially the short pieces contained in Murder in the Dark, are about how we as readers imagine those words on the page and make them come alive, too).

Happy endings margaret atwood discussion questions