Atonement before guilt: The end of history and the endings of mystery stories

Abstract

Extract

The ending of a story is crucial to the meaning of that story, producing a state of mind that liberates the significance. This does not necessarily mean that something is now clear that was not clear before, since a word of explanation at the beginning or in the middle would have brought about an insight that is gained only by the end. Johann Peter Hebel tells us about two peasants on their way to market. The rich one promises the poorer fellow to give him a cow if he agrees to swallow a frog. When the poor man has gobbled half of it, he promises the rich one that he will renounce his right to the cow if he will eat the rest of the frog. At the end both men ask themselves why they have swallowed a frog. And that is the question after the narration of a story. The essential thing is not the reestablishment of balance, whatever intricacies first disturbed it (by the way, the rich man stays rich and the poor man stays poor). The sense of this story is that only at the end can both men grasp the non-sense of their discourse. The clarity achieved by the end of a story is not a logical transparency, but rather an awareness of the intricate quality of the situation described. The guilt appears only at the end — the whole story was, from the beginning, an anticipated atonement.