Post 3: Happy Endings

Similar to the previous read stories, Margaret Atwood’s Happy Endings explores love through “realistic” terms. This story first gives the typical and hopeful outlook of love, and then lists a variety of dysfunctional (yet, common) relationships. But it was not the dysfunction the story portrayed that intrigued me. A few ideas from this story came to mind.

First, the appearance of the story helped with the presentation of the emotions. I liked the simplicity of the story: not necessarily the context, but the language used. The language of the story seemed to fill in the gap between the reader and the characters. One particular line that I enjoyed from the story was “Crying is bad for your face, everyone knows that and so does Mary but she can’t stop.” This line resembled an actual passing thought I would have if I saw Mary crying everyday at work. It was easy to place myself in the story. As well, vulgar language throughout the story helped allude to the realistic distress of love. Sometimes offensive language in literature aids with the expression of emotions that additional language just does not seem to fill. This text is a good example of connecting with the reader --- in an emotional sense.

Because of this connection, it became easier for me to engage with the text and develop several more thoughts about love. I feel like in a lot of scenarios in Happy Endings that characters suffered from a great deal heartache because their ideals were not met. This is a sensible example of many relationships. People get lost in their own hopes of love, that they completely lose the possibility of ever experiencing it. I feel as if this line sums it up best: “Don’t be deluded by any other ending, they’re all fake, either deliberately fake, with malicious intent to deceive, or just motivated by excessive optimism if not by downright sentimentality.”


My main purpose of this post is simply to explain that language plays a great deal in connecting with the context.