rolanni: (Ghost Ship)
[personal profile] rolanni
WARNING: There may be spoilers for Ghost Ship in comments. This is a Warning, this is your only Warning. Proceed at your own risk.

Edited to Add: 
Reminder to Anonymous Posters:  1. Please sign your post(s);  2. Anonymous posts don't appear until I manually OK them.  That means that sometimes -- like today, for instance -- there will be a period of hours before you will be able to see your post.  This is how the system is supposed to work, and you don't need to resubmit.

To everyone:  Good discussion; keep it coming.

So! There's an expressed view that Ghost Ship ends on a cliffhanger, in the form of The Epilogue. We frequently get rapped for "cliffhangers," a charge I happen to think is (1) unfortunate and (2) inaccurate, but that's a rant for another day. What's interesting about the Ghost Ship "cliffhanger" is that the presence of the epilogue creates the "cliffhanger."

My question to you, then, is --

Would Ghost Ship have been a fuller and more satisfying read for you, had there been no epilogue?  Explain, with diagrams, if necessary.

Mind you, Steve and I discussed this very thing at some length, and you see where we finally came down.  I do think this is a topic worthy of in-depth examination, and I'm interested to hear opinions.

Have at it.

Date: 2011-11-25 12:51 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ellenru.livejournal.com
For me the "cliffhanger" ended the book on something of an upbeat in that he's only "mostly dead". He may indeed succumb, but that would result in 2 deaths and I (personally) don't think you're going there. Of course, I could be horribly wrong, in which case I'll mourn both of them.

Without the epilogue I would have found it more of a full stop ending which I don't find as much to my taste - particularly if it had ended with the death, even if the magic tech had kicked in at the beginning of Dragon Ship. I'd rather see possibilities at the end and leaving things open for change (and cliffhangery) than have an end which is a pause in the action. Although, to argue from the other side, there is something to be said for the "pause in the action" ending. In this case, I didn't feel that the ending would have been that pause given that there was too much going on that I hadn't seen the answers to yet and even the "heroic" death would have been depressing to me.

I agree with Ellenru

Date: 2011-11-25 03:04 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] jim flack (from livejournal.com)
I think it was an upbeat cliffhanger as well, because we have hope that he will live, and we can assume that the next book will confirm that.
You didn't pull a Jim Butcher manuever, by having Harry Dresden get shot and fall back into the water on the last line of the book, with nothing saying whether or not he was dead and we'd never hear from him again, and then give us a follow-up book a year or so later that has Dresden as a freakin' GHOST, unable to really do much but talk, for the whole book. THAT hacked me off, because it smelled like what Conan Doyle did with Sherlock Holmes by having him fall over Reichenbach Falls...and you just can't kill iconic characters at the end of a novel and not expect fan outcry.

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