Run-up to Something Wicked This Way Comes(Or how the ending can just ruin your reading experience despite the enjoyable road to get there, or maybe not.)

I just finished Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes.

What an utterly silly ending.

And that silliness, the juvenile antics, the desperate laughter against the coming dark, is, of course, the point. "...We can't take them seriously...".

But when a scene doesn't connect with the reader that scene can only come off as bad. Badly and deeply silly. foolish and corny and ill-advised. There's a complete disconnect between the emotional investment in the various understandable and quite likeable characters, the various chapters of really well paced build-up of tension (which is a really hard thing to get right and yet there were several memorable tense scenes throughout the book). But then suddenly at the resolution its hoped for catharsis is then made a mockery of.

I feel let down.

By the end we're meant to laugh or cry in joy, in relief at the passing of danger and the end to mounting tension.
A heartbreaking moment in which we and the characters choose to give over to joy rather than fear. A hopeful message and a good one too. Like many lessons in the book, it is one to live your life by. The problem is that they, in what is a fraught and hopeless moment, the characters, deliberately make the choice to become happy in order to change the ending.

In a desperate and dark situation you can not just choose to be happy. To genuinely laugh, joyfully, in the face of your own despair is almost ludicrous, to laugh in such a situation is to tempt madness. And I'm not talking about wry laughter in recognition of some irony.. I'm talking about genuine Happy Joy, in full knowledge that that joy will change the outcome of whatever happens next. Knowing that without your positivity you get a bad ending. We're treading close to a paradox here. Belief as a tool powerful only in proportion to the power of your believing. And you, a rational being, knowing it.

But there's more.
At that point, in that scene, the writing is just as strained as the decision of the characters to be joyful.

Bradbury's writing and in particular his dialogue, already overly crafted, gets to be even more so. Dialogue in general is a hard thing to get right, but he seems to go an extra mile here; stunted sentences induced by despair and near-panic, juvenile expository exclamations. accompanied to the singing of several corny songs.

For other people this might very well be perfect. It just didn't connect how it should have with me.

And yet, it was close.
I know it was. I could almost feel it.


So this ending at first glance seemed like it just ruined my good reading experience up until this point.
But then, maybe I found something else in this scene.

The scene isn't genuinely touching, it isn't happy, it doesn't easily give rise to joy. And maybe it's not supposed to.

Just like the characters, we actually have to work for it. Deliberately create that emotional response. You have to strain for it to achieve it, strain to accept it. And then like our heroes, suddenly you deserve the happy ending.

In the end,
maybe that is the genius of this scene.

A perfect parallell of intent between reader and characters.



Or maybe I'm just emotionally dead.