Why Do We Only Understand Some Endings Thirty Years Later?

If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?

 Summary

Why do some book endings trouble us when we are young but feel profoundly right years later? Reflecting on The Old Man and the Sea, the author recalls once wishing Hemingway had given Santiago a happier ending. Time and life’s own struggles revealed that the novel had never needed a different ending—the reader needed a deeper understanding. This reflection explores how maturity reshapes our idea of success, showing that courage, perseverance, and integrity often matter more than outward achievement. Great books do not change with time; they patiently wait for readers to grow into the wisdom their endings have always contained.

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Whose Ending Really Changed — the Book’s or Mine?

If you could change the ending of any book, which one would it be?

At twenty-five I knew exactly which ending I would change. Today, at the far end of a working life, I would leave it untouched — and the book has not altered a single word.

The amendment I would have moved at twenty-five

The book is Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Santiago rows out further than any sensible fisherman would, fights a marlin for three days, lashes it to the skiff, and turns for home. The sharks come. He beats them off with a harpoon, then a knife, then a club, then the tiller. By the time he reaches the shore he has a skeleton tied to his boat and nothing else.

I found that unbearable. I wanted the fish landed. Not the whole fish, necessarily — I would have settled for a quarter of it, enough to weigh on a scale, enough for the village to see. Give the old man one shark fewer. Let him keep the tail section. Let the effort produce a result that somebody could measure.

That was the ending I would have drafted: the same voyage, the same courage, but with a receipt at the end of it.

What actually changed

Nothing in the novel. The sharks still come. What changed is that I have since carried home a few skeletons of my own.

Anyone who has worked long enough knows the shape of it. You go out further than was strictly required. You give a file, a report, a draft, or a cause everything you have. And what returns to shore is a fraction of what you fought for — recommendations quietly shelved, a provision struck out, years of labour reduced to a line in somebody’s minutes.

At twenty-five that seemed like failure, and failure needed correcting. At sixty it looks like the ordinary arithmetic of a life spent doing serious work. Santiago says he went out too far. He is not apologising. He is stating the price of having gone out at all.

The reader is the variable

This is the part the younger man could not have seen. Hemingway did not write a story about loss. He wrote a story about a man who is still a fisherman when the boat is empty, who sleeps afterwards and dreams of lions, and whose boy is waiting on the beach in the morning. The skeleton is not the failure of the voyage. The skeleton is the proof of it — the only evidence that a fish that size ever existed.

Had I got my amendment, I would have received a pleasant story about a good catch. What I have instead is a book that took thirty years to finish explaining itself.

A note on an earlier reflection

A closely related prompt came up on 25 June 2026 — “If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?” — and I took a different line there, arguing that a book’s ending functions like the terminal value in a financial model, giving worth to everything that precedes it, so that changing an ending does not improve the book but replaces it. That post is here:

Can You Really Change a Book’s Ending Without Changing the Entire Story? 

I stand by it. Today I would only add the missing half of the argument. It is not merely that the ending cannot be changed without destroying the book. It is that the ending we object to is usually the one still waiting for us to grow into it. The page is fixed. The reader is not.

Which brings me to the question I put to myself before writing this. Is there any ending I dislike today because it is genuinely poor — or because I have not yet lived the chapter that would explain it to me?

If there is a book whose ending you once wanted to rewrite, read it again. You may find that the correction was needed at your end of the page, not the author’s.

Was there an ending you fought against once, only to accept it years later — and what happened in between? Tell me in the comments.

If reflections on books, faith, and the long work of understanding encourage you, do join our newsletter. Every edition brings something to think with.

Written in response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt — 27 July 2026

Johnbritto Kurusumuthu

Founder

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