Happy Endings

If theme is what a story is about, “Happy Endings” is about what stories are about: Atwood writes a story that is about writing a story. Metafictional narratives are self-reflexive, often radically so, and, in effect, seek proactively to never allow the reader to get “lost” in the story, and instead consistently remind the reader that what they are reading is a construction, and not ‘organic,’ or natural.

“Happy Endings” employs numerous elements of metafiction. Atwood consistently intrudes on the narrative to comment on said narrative, especially in the story’s last section. She does so, in that section, to directly address the reader, another tenet of metafiction. The story rejects conventional plot, and in consistently having the characters in various sections wind up back in Section A, Atwood would seem to flaunt the instability of the narrative, another feature of metafiction. Atwood’s story imitates a story, as opposed to imitating the “real world.”