When I heard this story on the radio, I immediately perked up and turned up the volume. The speaker explained how spoilers can actually make the story more enjoyable by allowing an audience to enjoy the story and writing a little more than just the shock ending, and this is evidenced by the overwhelming popularity of genre fiction going back to the beginning of time-- romances which always end in a wedding, epics where the hero never fails in his quest. We consume these stories, knowing full well how they'll turn out, for the journey itself. We want to know why and how they'll get to their inevitable conclusion.
As I listened, this was pretty much my face.
Of course, I was in my car alone, so passersby probably thought I was insane. But it was an expression of receiving a confirmation that the way I had always felt about spoilers was completely valid and not at all unusual. In fact, the majority of stories mankind has told throughout the ages, from Beowulf to Nora Roberts, have been an expression of exactly this urge to follow a story, enjoy the twists and turns, and still have a relative idea of how it will end. Maybe it's this acute awareness of my own mortality, and it's an expression of my deepest desire to know how life itself turns out in the end. Or maybe I'm just impatient. Either way, I always seem to find myself reading the last page first, and now I can be satisfied in the knowledge that most of you do it, too.
7 comments:
Great post! I love the visual. Admittedly, I peak at the ending early on occasion. There's something very comforting about knowing how it all turns out.
Jackie, I agree with you about spoilers. I like seeing how the film or story was put together as much as watching it unravel. "How" a story means is as interesting to me as "what" it means, if you know what I mean.
I agree with Lynne--great post! I admit I prefer not to know the ending ahead, but to experience the events in the story as the characters experience them. That said, I've never NOT read a book because I know the ending.
I'm not afraid of "spoiler alerts" or skipping ahead to the ending. In fact I've done that many times when I find myself losing interest in a book. By reading the ending I can decide whether to go back and finish reading everything in between, or save myself all those hours I would never get back again.
Wait- Dumbledore DIES?! LALALA I'MNOTLISTENING! Really though, I don't mind spoilers either usually. At the risk of exposing my geekiness, I sought out spoilers for the recent Transformers movie trilogy, I wanted to know everything about the movies going in. Strangely though, I will not read ahead to the ending of a book, somehow it seems sacrilegious.
And Lynne, don't fib- you always peek ahead :-D!
Yes, I'm guilty. Often I will read ahead. And it doesn't spoil the book for me - in fact in enhances it.
But, not for mysteries! I want to guess who done it. I'm pretty good at guessing.
Alfred Hitchcock said that suspense is knowing what's going to happen but now knowing when. If that's true, I guess it doesn't matter if you know how the story ends. This does not alter the fact that you are all crazy, however.
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