Abstract

The tidy little happy ending, at least among contemporary Hispanic women writers, is no longer a given. A consideration of narratives by Carmen Laforet, Esther Tusquets, Ana María Moix, Rosa Montero, Isabel Franc, and Marisa Silva Schultze indicates that these writers use techniques which leave their readers-voluntarily or involuntarily-very much immersed in the world of the work. If, as Bruce DeSilva has declared, “Every story has to arrive at a destination …. That’s the whole point of the story, to get to that destination,” then these endings merit closer examination and categorization. Using studies such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers and Earl G. Ingersoll’s Waiting for the End: Gender and Ending in the Contemporary Novel, I propose to analyze some of the endings provided in the fiction of these women writers and discover what sets them apart from the traditional ending.