The William Trevor Reader: “Death in Jerusalem”

once said that he wanted the endings of his stories to “[shift] the center of gravity in order to produce maximum thought.” This aspiration, in my view, doesn’t just describe what good endings do, but what good stories do. Endings are not, after all, simply tacked on to the last bit of a narrative. They are its culmination, the place the story was always secretly going; if a good ending lets the cat out of the bag, the puts it, “A good ending is both surprising and inevitable.”