ABSTRACT
Balzac’s codas are central to the following chapter. In such stories as “Gobseck,” the definitive conclusions were added after the fact, suggesting that the author sought to pose a challenge, but often they simply ended ambiguously. “Gillette” concludes withan enigma, posing the central conflict between love, life, and art. Outstanding stories regularly use terminal confusion to force readers to seek an underlying image in the open conclusions. “L’Auberge rouge,” for example, builds a tangled pattern of multifaceted guilt until the reader seizes the terms of oxymoronic innocence and culpability to “write” a resolution.
