Student Question

How does Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood relate to Kermode's assertion about book endings in The Sense of an Ending?

In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode writes: "The reader cannot be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have an end. Unless we are naive, we do not ask that they progress as precisely as we want or as we have been given to believe."

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Dylan Thomas's play, Under Milk Wood, lacks a sense of an ending. The question was: In The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode writes: "The reader cannot be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have an end. Unless we are naive, we do not ask that they progress as precisely as we want or as we have been given to believe." How does Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood relate to this assertion? Thomas's play has a literal end, but no sense of having arrived anywhere meaningful. The answer was probably wrong because it did not discuss the way in which the story progresses (i.e.

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Like any written work, Under Milk Wood has a literal end, a final page after which the words run out. What it lacks, to borrow Frank Kermode's title, is the sense of an ending. The play presents a day in the life of the people of Llareggub. There is no...

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sign that either their dreams or their actions are exceptional on this day. The point at which the drama stops seems arbitrary, as though Thomas could equally well have chosen to present the next twenty-four hours to his readers instead.

In fact it is the lack of a definitive end, rather than the way in which the story progresses, that has the potential to alienate the reader. Once their characters have been established, Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard, Captain Cat, the Reverend Jenkins, and other characters behave much as expected. Their thoughts and dreams remain more consistent with their actions than is often the case in either fiction or reality.

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