Endings are created by interpretations which exploit our knowledge of what came before

In this blog post, I explain and illustrate two things about endings. The first is that an ending is established as an outcome of an interpretation of the text; it is not an observer-independent fact about the text. The second is that the ending of a text can exploit the audience’s prior knowledge of the text, because the ending (usually) comes at the end, and that this can give endings an emotional boost based on expectation and surprise, accompanied by the empathy we have developed for characters.