The tonic chord of the last line — that’s our topic. The tonal and thematic closure of a literary episode found with the right string of words. The well-struck final sentence of a well-structured novel or essay or even film brings a session of the reader’s consiousness to a close. Within a definable portion of one’s finite existence, the last line marks the cessation of a who and a when and a what that was spent with a piece of writing.
Meaning does not stop with the final line, of course; that’s not my claim. The life of a lived work does not stop when we close the cover for the first time. A piece of writing is alive after it is read, learned by heart, sometimes, though it need not be learned by heart to live, and then it is alive in us until our death, if it meant a lot to us. We may return to the work even if we never see it again.
Rather, when I say that the final line, if right, brings an end, what I mean is that an aesthetically, even ethically comprehensible finitude has been created in the space of life. A mortality in miniature, a totem is there in the soul where before there was none; an object round on all sides (or jagged if that is the author’s purpose) to be studied, kept in one’s spiritual pocket, remembered, cherished, or perhaps disquietedly revered. A thing with meaning.