In elementary school was the first time I was ever really mad at a book.
My class read the classic dystopian novel “The Giver” by Lois Lowry and I was enthralled by it.
The book was super fascinating to me, I think in large part because it was probably the first time I’d really digested a book in which so much was murky.
What some characters thought was right, others thought was blatantly wrong, and you as a reader got to choose who you aligned with. Even better was the fact that the 12-year-old protagonist, Jonas, was making these decisions, too.
It makes total sense that a book that hinges on this would end with a scene that allows the reader to decide whether the protagonist succeeds (I’ll leave it vague because the only thing worse than a cliffhanger is a spoiler).
But, the same internal wrestling I loved doing throughout the book wasn’t as appreciated as an ending.
During in-class discussions when we were asked to share what we felt Jonas’ fate was, I couldn’t decide. I’m not the author, wasn’t Lowry supposed to tell me this?
For years and years, my stance on “The Giver” was that I loved the book but hated the ending.
Lindsay Hahn, a researcher and professor at the University of Buffalo, recently researched whether readers actually enjoy a cliffhanger.
Participants in her study read the same narrative with one of three endings: a cliffhanger, the protagonist coming out on top or the antagonist succeeding.
As it turns out – cliffhangers are “right in the middle,” Hahn said.
She said that people naturally feel uncomfortable when there is a lack of resolution, but they like one thing even less: the villain winning.
I guess she’s right because I would have been much more upset with the ending if there was no room to believe that everything turned out well for Jonas.
So, in the case of books, Hahn’s research showed that cliffhangers aren’t typically uncomfortable enough to spoil a story.
Instead, even if it takes years for a sequel to be released, Hahn said suspenseful endings often achieve what authors hope to by encouraging readers to pick up the next book in a series.
While I haven’t yet read Lowry’s companion novels – released seven, 11 and 14 years after “The Giver” – I’m sure plenty of readers picked them up because they still needed to know what happened to Jonas.
There’s definitely something to be said about creating suspense around characters that readers are so invested in that they, like me, would wonder about it for years.
Plus, if Lowry hadn’t crafted an ending that kept me wondering, I’m not so sure that it would still be such a standout on my reading list, or that I’d remember so keenly the things I learned from it.
And I think I do owe her an apology because, after all that time of insisting that I hated her ending, during a Q & A at the National Book Festival, she was still kind enough to offer to the audience: “Jonas is alive, by the way. You don’t need to ask that question.”
The research backs it up, but I think there’s probably a part of Lowry that always knew, no matter how good of a cliffhanger, the hero winning is even better.
-Kayleen Petrovia is a reporter for the Journal-Tribune.