abinav khatelsal asked 7 years ago
If you are allowed to make an addition to the story and bring it to a more satisfactory conclusion, how would you end the story “A Face in the Dark” by Ruskin Bond?
Well, Bond’s story “A Face in the Dark” ends at such a climatic point that it leaves most readers somewhat dissatisfied and wondering what might have happened to Mr. Oliver thereafter. The author leaves it to the readers to stretch their imagination.
If I have to give the story a more conclusive ending, I would like to think that Mr. Oliver would run again in the opposite direction calling for help when he would trip on a rock and fall on the ground. At this point he would wake up in perspiration and know all this was just a dream in his sleep.
At first, let me eliminate all the other point of views:
- As mentioned by the author, Mr Oliver “ was not a nervous or imaginative man ”, so it was not his fear of walking in the pine forests which made him imagine those strange things.
- You may say that the light of Mr Oliver’s torch was flickering and as the pine forest was completely dark therefore his eyes might have fallen into illusion and for that, he could only see the smooth face of the boy (without any feature) and the watchman but if it was so then when Mr Oliver told the watchman about that boy, why did the watchman told him that- if the boy’s face was like his face and raised the lamp to his face which was too featureless. It means that the watchman knew that his face was too featureless and it was not an illusion which Mr Oliver might have seen due to sickness or a disease or some kind of that thing.
- And at last, you can say that as Mr Oliver was a school teacher, therefore, any of his students can play a prank with Mr Oliver to shock him but no student can play such a horrible prank that his teacher almost gets a heart attack and if we take that the students wanted to kill Mr Oliver, then from where did the watchman came and if the watchman was too involved then he would have murdered Mr Oliver before only.
So after all these justifications, the final ending can only either of two things:
- The watchman and the boy were both stricken by some serious face ebbing disease, for which both of them were concerned, which is less probable.
- The most probable ending, of which the reader wants us to have a clear confession that the boy and the watchman were both ghosts which wanted to scare(somewhat kill) Mr.Oliver for coming regularly in their homeland or the pine forest during the night.
I would like to make the plot like this :
The smooth headed boy and watchman were a part of very big anonymous smugglers who had their basement in the jungles and who ever came into it were frightened by them so that they never come back to the jungle again ….
This would make the story a bit more thrilling…
If I were to add an additional point to this story to make a more satisfactory ending, I would say when Mr Oliver woke up in the morning he woke up with a fright, he looked around and saw none. He could barely forget his terrified experience he had last night and that’s when he noticed that he was admitted in the hospital. He was put into observation, as he was one of the most renowned people of that particular locality and none had expected such a thing. When the doctors checked for the cause, they found a chemical intake from Mr Oliver’s lungs that caused him hallucinations.
Later the police found out that since the forest route was used by barely anyone, some drug dealers who were about to start some drug business for the school boys used that way and on the way they had dropped the drugs there.
The police are yet to find whether it was on purpose or it was a mistake because such an illegal substance will not be taken with such carelessness.