The Case for Ambiguity in Storytelling

I’m often conflicted when it comes to stories with ambiguous endings. They risk confusing people or, worse, making them feel tricked and cheated.

But lately, I’ve read and watched a string of books and movies that all hinge on ambiguity, and I’ve loved every one of them. Which begs the question: Why?

What distinguishes an effective ambiguous narrative from one that just feels like the author is either lazy or pretentious? And, if clarity isn’t the point of a story, what is?

External (Not Internal) Ambiguity

Let’s start by looking at one of the most well-known and well-received movies with an ambiguous ending, Inception.

Inception famously ends with its main character reuniting with his children, but before the audience learns whether this reunion takes place in the real world or the dream world he has built.

The ending is still satisfying for two reasons. First, because although the main character’s physical location is uncertain, his choices are clear. He has inexorably changed from a man committed to facing harsh reality – constantly checking his spinning token to make sure he’s not lost in the maze of dreams — to a man so desperate to see his kids, he rushes toward them with open arms before knowing if this happy ending is of his own making. His character arc is complete.

Secondly, the ambiguous ending reinforces the theme of the movie: that dreams are intoxicating, and most people want happiness so badly, they will choose illusion over truth.

In other words, by withholding facts, the narrative delivers meaning.

Ambiguity in Service to the Subject Matter  

I think this is a crucial distinction between ambiguous art that “works” and that which feels like the author just painted themselves into a narrative corner and bailed.

Take the psychological horror novella The Night Guest written by Hildur Knutsdottir and translated by May Robinette Kowal. In it, a woman experiences symptoms of extreme fatigue and unexplained bruises that her doctors dismiss. Then one night she falls asleep with her watch on and wakes to finds she has walked over 40,000 steps.

The brief book is at times sad, funny, extremely relatable, then bizarrely surreal. In the end, the reader is left with enough details to answer the novella’s mystery in at least two different ways.

Either: a) The main character is going mad; b) Something fantastical/supernatural is going on; or c) Maybe a bit of both. (Warning, spoilers ahead!)

I admit, my first reaction after reading the last lines of the story was wwhhhaaaattt in the world just happened?  Had her dead sister somehow come back to life or had the main character developed a split personality? Was the sister demanding sacrifices of animals and men, or was the main character homicidal? Was she killing her sister in the last scene — or herself?

Part of the fun came in the next few days as I chewed over the ending, picking through all the clues.

My conclusion (and your mileage my vary) is that the protagonist has gone mad with grief and anger after her sister’s death. The reason the author doesn’t just say this is because that wouldn’t convey what going mad is like. The novella isn’t written from the perspective of an objective witness; it’s written in first person. So the reader is confused, terrified, desperate, and disoriented — just like the protagonist.  

Instead of delivering just facts, the book delivers an immersive emotional experience. It’s no coincidence that ambiguous stories often deal with dreams, sleep, mental health issues and death. These are all ambiguous, mysterious subjects.

This is also why, when I wrote my own speculative short story about the uncertainty of parenting and the anxiety of never knowing if you are making the right decision with kids, I also chose an ending with some uncertainty, despite a clear character change in my protagonist. 

Ambiguity in Service to the Moral

But not every effective ambiguous story hinges on questions about “what really happened” in the end. The movie Parasite by South Korean director Bong Joon Ho, co-written by Han Jin-won, takes the opposite approach.

In the black comedy/thriller, a poor family cons itself into the employment of a rich family. In the beginning of the film, I thought I understood where this was going: The street-savvy family members were the “good guys” and I expected that through a series of increasingly desperate hijinks, they were going to claw their way up to the comfortable life they deserved, wrestling it from the spoiled jerks who they chauffeur, cook and clean for. 

But that’s not what happened.

First, the rich family was kinder and more gullible than I expected. Then, the poor family became increasingly ruthless. Finally, a shock: they discover an even more destitute man has been secretly living in their rich employer’s basement, eating the rich family’s scraps, for years.

Do they help? No. They only make things worse. This confused me. Maybe, I thought, the family members were actually the “bad guys?” Despite all their own hardships, they were going to turn a blind eye to the man’s suffering and earn some horrible cosmic comeuppance.  That would explain the growing tension I felt as the narrative unfolded.

Wrong again.  

The ambiguity in Parasite doesn’t lie in what happens. By the end, we have no doubt about the terrible outcome of events. People die. Others lose their home or freedom. And, despite everything, the poor son’s goal remains unchanged – to someday become rich and buy that fancy house where everything went so wrong.

Instead, the ambiguity lies in the unexplained “why” behind the characters’ actions and the  movie’s refusal to stick to a simple “us vs. them” narrative.  Author Henry Lien explains it much better than I can in his excellent book Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling.

Parasite follows a four-act structure known as kishotenketsu. And this structure, Lien says, is “more interested in exploring the unseen relationships among the story’s elements than pitting them against one another.”  This relationship is a “revelation” that comes as a third-act twist and often “feels like a new element in itself.”(And if you don’t think this tool can be used in Western storytelling, too, think again. I still remember the moment I first heard the revelation, “Luke, I am your father.”)

But because I’m used to Hollywood formulas, I’d been trained to look for the more clearcut, conflict-driven message of the poor vs. the rich. This Academy award-winning film refuses that. This isn’t class warfare, it’s a class web of interconnected and conflicting ambitions, resentments, fears, privileges and pain that all of the characters share and suffer to varying degrees.

To be clear, the refusal to make an overly broad, black-and-white characterization isn’t a lack of a moral, it is the moral. And if you’ve become tired of cliched, preachy, or predictable movies like I have, this is as satisfying as it gets.

Ambiguity as an Act of Creative Collaboration   

As my final example of ambiguity that works, I’m not going to analyze another film or book. Instead, I’m going to recommend you read the beautiful, heartbreaking short story “In My Country,” by author Thomas Ha.

Here, ambiguity is used in yet another set of permutations – to talk about politics (what is allowed in a dystopian, oppressive regime and what is forbidden), language (what is said and not said, as well as words with double meanings) and the power of storytelling.

And it’s for that last reason, I’ll stop summarizing and let you go make your own conclusions.

Here’s an excerpt:

“When we do not understand something, we question, we grasp, and we connect. Even if the connection makes no technical sense, we create the connections. With each other, with ideas, with something else. We empathize. We engage. We become unpredictable and unknowable. That is mystery, faith, compassion.”