Alternative Ending: Good People

 Write an alternative ending to a story we’ve read, imitating the style of the story. Then write a post (of three or more paragraphs) that explains why you reimagined the ending as you did and that analyzes how your ending changes the meaning of the story. Your analysis should engage with details in the original story in addition to commenting on specific details in your alternative ending.

“What would even Jesus do? For now it was just now he felt her two small strong soft hands on his, to turn him. What if he was just afraid, if the truth was no more than this, and if what to pray for was not even love but simple courage, to meet both her eyes as she says it and trust his heart?”

But she didn’t say it. Her hair fell over her shoulder in one unbroken curtain, veiling her face from his sight. He felt like a monster now for looking at her this way, for expecting her to play out his game. It was horrible of him to think the Lord would let him bind himself to her, someone who was so good and serious and whom he didn’t deserve. No, she would still carry this, but it would be hers and hers alone. He would offer, but it would be empty, because he was never taught to love like a man is supposed to. Lane Dean Jr. was never a prophet, never had been and never could be a proper vessel for the Lord, and why would divine love be on his side? 

He kept looking at her, desperate, and when she spoke at last—truly spoke, when she pushed her hair from her face and turned to him, opening her mouth but not taking his hands—he knew he was gone from her life for good.

“Tomorrow.” 

Tomorrow, and it was over for him and over for her and for the weight she was carrying—well, she would bleed and carry the memory of the cold white lights in the clinic forever, and he was meant to walk away. He understood it when she said it, that she was turning her back on him too. But tomorrow? He’d thought she would have carried it and left him, but she was undoing everything, undoing her faith. He saw it now—that he wasn’t the only one who saw himself and Sheri as two fools under the eyes of Heaven. 

***

Something that stood out to me about the ending of “Good People” was how delusional Lane Dean Jr. sounds—when he starts wondering about what Jesus would do, or whether he even has any earthly idea of love, he almost starts to sound possessed by a deep-set sense of religious guilt. He’s on his way to marry Sheri because he has to, he is compelled to, whether he wants to or not. In my alternative ending to “Good People,” I decided to break up this delusion by extending Lane Dean’s internal monologue and allowing him to reflect on himself and whether he is truly a good person under the eyes of God. In my reimagining, he notes that Sheri’s hair “fell over her shoulder… veiling her face from his sight. He felt like a monster now for looking at her this way.” I used the word “veil” intentionally to evoke Lane’s intention to marry Sheri against his own will. However, Lane then notes that he “felt like a monster,” denoting his realization that he does feel guilty about “binding himself to her.” 

Another facet of “Good People” that I wanted to explore in this ending was Sheri’s personality. She never speaks at a word in Foster Wallace’s original work, and all our background on her comes from Lane Dean’s perspective. He notes that she is “serious in her faith and values.” Similarly, everything else he says about her seems to place her on a pedestal. In his mind, she is too mature and too “good” for him, and there’s almost an element of self-deprecation to the way he describes their relationship. In my ending, Sheri finally breaks her silence, telling Lane Dean that she’ll be heading to the clinic tomorrow to have her abortion, and it is implied that she does not want him to come with her, or to reappear in her life at any point afterwards. This decision seems to go against Lane’s characterization of her—why would a young Christian, “serious in her faith and values,” decide to go through with the abortion? While this ending doesn’t give us the “whole picture” of who Sheri really is, it does give us a taste of Lane’s unreliability as a narrator. 

Of course, this prompt also tasked me with imitating David Foster Wallace’s writing style. I believe I made it clear in class that I really don’t enjoy Foster Wallace as an author—but surprisingly enough, I found it fairly easy to imitate his peculiar rambling, soliloquy-like prose. Perhaps I spent too much time analyzing what I didn’t like in his writing as I was reading the original. Either way, I consciously tried to imitate his method of hiding details in writing. Instead of prefacing Sheri’s one word of dialogue with active signal phrasing—something like “Sheri pushed her hair out of his face and turned to him,” I introduced Sheri’s action of speaking later on in the sentence than I normally would in my own writing style.