ABSTRACT
The endings of short stories have attracted a good deal of attention over the decades. Guidance books addressed to the would-be story-writer were dispensing advice in the 1920s and 30s on how to handle them, and still are. The culmination whether comments or event, to which the short story drives, became increasingly ostentatious in the last part of the nineteenth century. In the case of late nineteenth-century French short stories, this literary 'violence' can be tentatively located in a historical context. Guy de Maupassant blends an evocation of diverse kinds of cruelty with an acute sense of form, a blend climactically exemplified in his endings. Jorge Luis Borges's story, while celebrating the power of the mind to play with time, also as it were the calls out for mercy, especially at the end. This is one of the effects the short story can achieve.
