Last year, my English class spent an entire period on smiles—specifically why? When we see people smiling in the hallways or on the street, we so often label them dumb or weird.
Perhaps, I answered, because we tend to quite wrongfully place greater artistic and intellectual value on sadness. One boy exclaimed his agreement with wide eyes and open hands. It always angered him, he said, when a friend of his would say that happiness depended on a shallow understanding of life.
“But you’re always smiling,” he said. “I used to think that meant you were dumb or weird, but now that I’ve gotten to know you, I realize you’re just nice.” (I should add that this is probably one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me. Classmate, if you are reading this, thanks very much!)
I thought back to that discussion and to the notion that happiness depends on a shallow understanding of life the other day when a student in my English class said that she liked Zora Neale-Hurston’s The Gilded Six-Bits because, in contrast to the other short stories we had read, it ended happily.
As my classmates and I explore the often bitter, often disappointment-tinged world of American literature, I hope that we do not begin to mistake the unhappy ending for the inherently more truthful ending.
Among some teenagers, I think, there is a particular lust for stories that end in loss and destruction. It is perhaps, like so many other things teenagers do, an expression of the desire to be taken seriously as adults. We are not naïve. We know that the world is often cruel, and we no longer wish to be told that all things work out in the end because we know that they often don’t. These deeper truths, concealed from us throughout our childhood, become the truths we long for our stories to illuminate.
But not all stories must end in disappointment in order to be truthful. I am especially sensitive to the notion that in art, sadness should be taken more seriously than joy, in part because I have suffered from debilitating anxiety—the kind you take medication for, and that holds you captive from school for so long that the state nearly takes your parents to court—since middle school. In that time, I have made many close friends who suffer from forms of depression and anxiety more serious than my own. These friends often recount the words of their own friends and family members who tell them that their depression indicates a thoughtful character and a heightened sensitivity to the inherent cruelties of life. That it perhaps represents something for which they should be grateful.
And that is hurtful because this kind of sadness—the kind not simply felt but diagnosed—should not be romanticized. In my own experience, it does not result from a greater sensitivity to the inherent cruelties of life because it does not listen to rhyme or reason. In my own experience, it more often paralyzes the brain than spurs it into action. It is, in my own experience, better expressed not in mournful violins and metaphors evoking bottomless wells and darkened skies and cold seas, but in eyes sticky with gunk, hair gone unwashed for three days and a crack in your bedroom ceiling that’s kept watch over your back in the six hours you’ve spent with your face to your pillow. In this kind of sadness, this hopelessness felt from day-to-day, there is no grandeur.
So I know, from first-hand experience, that the happy ending is a necessary thing. Joy is not always shallow. It is not always the ploy of the lazy writer who would rather win the audience’s favor with feel-good tripe than explore the depths of real emotion. Sometimes, happiness is hard-earned and found only in the confrontation of pain. Maturity, for me, has not meant giving myself over to my anxiety, but rather gaining the confidence to triumph in its spite.
This is not to say that I do not want stories that are sad. But I am in many ways not just more needful of but also more impressed by the story that shows the world in all its cruelty, yet still, in choosing the happy ending, convincingly depicts the triumph of hope. And I know that sometimes the needlessly cruel ending only feigns at deeper meaning.
My favorite series of graphic novels, Fullmetal Alchemist, ended in 2010—and at this point I should probably act really embarrassed about Japanese comics, except I’m not going to do that because Fullmetal Alchemist is the best, and I have loved it since I was 10, which is a really ridiculously long time to love something—and to this day, I still meet fans disappointed that in order to accomplish his goals, the main character never learned to kill, and that the series did not end with his death. It ended too happily, they say, and as such, felt insincere.
We all want different things from our stories, and that’s fine. But as I see it, Fullmetal Alchemist not once condescended to its audience. Though it is a story about idealism, it does not present an idealized world. Its characters include genocidal soldiers who strive for atonement though they know they can never achieve it, and teenage boys who see men commit the worst cruelties against their own daughters yet still would rather give up their bodies than take a human life.
It is a story about the triumph of idealism over cynicism, in which we emerge stronger for having encountered the greatest evils. As I see it, its ending stayed true to its central conceit, one which celebrates the human capacity for progress and hope without shying away from painful truths—that though there are some losses that can never be filled and some sins for which we can never atone, our suffering should still push us forward.
To have betrayed these central themes, evident throughout the story, in favor of tragedy for tragedy’s sake, would seem, to me, as cheap as any dishonest happy ending could possibly be. And in a story that illustrates both the best and worst humanity has to offer, why ask for hopelessness?
