When I was eight years old and more susceptible to devastation than I will ever be again, I first experimented with a practice that would later become a habit: I started reading a book I loved in smaller and smaller increments as I approached the end. The book in question was Watership Down, the longest I’d ever attempted, and I had loved it forever—or at least, I had loved it since spring started softening the grey rigor of winter, which amounted to the same thing. For a child, life is a series of small eternities; a day was a year, a week was a life, and I would always be reading Watership Down in the muddy yard as the fresh spikes of the crocuses pushed up through the ground.
Only twenty years later, when that first eternity was over, would I discover that the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset had explained the predicament I sensed so obscurely in the offing. “The titles of certain books are like names of cities in which we used to live for a time,” he wrote. “They at once bring back a climate, a peculiar smell of streets, a general type of people and a specific rhythm of life.” That was it exactly: Watership Down was a place where I had taken up residence and which I could not stand to leave.
So I limited myself, first to twenty pages a day, then to ten, then to five. Yet no matter how slowly I read, I still progressed towards the final chapter, then the final page, then the final word, until at last I was expelled from the singular world of Watership Down and disabused of the notion that books might somehow be made to go on forever. I had half-expected the novel to grow longer as I read it, but it hadn’t, and now I was finished. This was my original apprenticeship in the fundamental tragedy of reading. Every story, no matter how ambitious or abundant, is doomed to end; no text is coterminous with the world itself. And this problem is an intimation of the fundamental problem. As the poet Stanley Kunitz puts it, “How shall the heart be reconciled / to its feast of losses?”
Naturally, then, I have a special affection for narratives that aren’t reconciled to this feast, that gesture defiantly at their own continuation. The most conspicuous and self-conscious of these is Sartre’s No Exit. The last line, “eh bien, continuons,” is a despairing acknowledgment that the characters’ volley of recriminations will go on forever. But Sartre is not the only one to end a book by refusing to end it, and by my lights works that reject their own termination make up a genre unto themselves. There’s Notes from Underground, whose volatile protagonist goes on ranting long after the book is over, or so the text assures us: “The notes of this paradoxalist do not end here, however. He could not refrain from going on with them, but it seems to us that we may stop here.” And then there’s Dorothy Parker’s restive story, “A Telephone Call,” in which the narrator talks herself into believing that the man she loves is on the brink of getting in touch. When we leave her, she is hard at work convincing herself that he will have called by the time she finishes counting to five hundred in increments of five. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five…”
Other stories do not end because they remain unfinished. The Castle breaks off mid-sentence because Kafka died before he could complete it—but then again, it is hard to imagine how he might have continued the book if he had lived longer. The Castle does not end in part because it could not end; K cannot find his way to the castle because the castle is precisely that which eludes him, precisely that which he can only ever approach asymptotically. Kafka was obsessed by distances that expand as we venture across them, and his stories are full of nightmarish geographies that function as the spatial instantiations of the castle’s inaccessibility. Roads lengthen beneath his characters’ feet; courtyards open onto other courtyards; behind each door is another door. Endings and their putative satisfactions are dispelled by the convolutions of the very landscape. No one can ever reach the end of Watership Down because nobody can ever reach anything.
For Kafka, perpetual continuation was a hellish proposition, but for me, the notion of endlessness is a balm. What could be better than a road that grows beneath your feet, a book that thickens as you read it? Perhaps each of these unwillingly endless texts belies its nominal aversion to the consolations of eternity. At the very least, they present a formal remedy to an ontological problem. For Sartre, Dostoevsky, and Parker, the answer to finitude is recursion: their books end with instructions to start all over again. For Kafka, the answer is prolongation: both his stories and his unfinished novels expand, pushing the ending so far into the distance that we can barely perceive it. Despite themselves, they are of a piece with the oldest and most irresistible fiction of all: the fiction of eternity. Maybe this is not a fiction but our eventual fate. One day we will be reconciled to our feast of losses or we won’t have to be, until which time we can only conclude by refusing to conclude, by muttering obtinately, “Eh bien, continuons…”
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post and an editor at The Point. Her first book, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, was published in 2024 by Metropolitan Books.
