Lost - No Man Is an Island

As soon as the series finale of Lost ended, I went to the discussion boards to see what people thought about it.  To my surprise, a lot of people were dissatisfied, wanting more from the ending, and wishing more questions had been cleared up.

This surprised me even though I know that having all of one's questions answered after reading a long mystery is one of the ultimate rewards and satisfactions one can achieve.  But the whole nature of the show Lost seemed -- at least to me -- not ever to be about resolving mysteries, but rather of stretching the bounds of belief.  Fiction is, after all, about conjuring up made-up worlds and in these worlds, sometimes things just exist.  There is no why to them.  That is just the way they are.  That is how that world exists.  We don't ask why trees exist, why animals exist, why we have oceans, or why there is a Jabba the Hut, or why magical spells only work in ancient or made-up languages.  They just do.

But most of the fun of Lost (I gather from all the discussions and reviews about it) came from being able to ask, "Why?"  "Why this?" and "Why that?"  And people came up with their own theories and ideas.  I think in crafting this ending, the writers wanted to stay true to that ability with Lost.  They wanted to leave room for interpretation, so that not just one theory could hold true but dozens upon dozens of theories.  That's what writers like to do.  And the more theories you can leave plausible, the better you feel about your writing, because then you know that it has engaged other people's imagination and becomes bigger than you could ever imagine.  The world abounds in mysteries and interpretations and being able to come even somewhat close to that ability, gives a writer one of the greatest satisfactions.  To be cut and dried was never the tone of Lost, anyway, and the ending was the same.

To be fair, I did not watch the full six seasons of Lost.  I watched the first, some of the second, and then the fifth and sixth.  So maybe that is why I am satisfied with the ending.  I wasn't exposed to all of the mysteries of the island and left wondering about them, and hoping the ending would answer them.  Whatever mysteries I was exposed to, I was left satisfied by the ending.

Of course, the real reason I headed for the discussion boards soon after the show was to see if people's interpretations of the ending weren't like mine.  One of the first posts I read from an LA Times blog scoffed at the terrible ending, saying that it was a terrible way to end the show because it meant that they had all died when the plane crashed and everything after that had been purgatory and unreal.  I found the author's outrage to be ridiculous (although the presumption was plausible, if you wanted to believe that) and rated her so, and was glad to see others had rated her remarks the same.  It was ridiculous because she obviously watched the show with an eye to criticize, and because she touted her interpretation as the ultimate and only answer.

In my interpretation, which I found an ally with in another article and felt keenly validated, Jack dies at the end when his eyes close, after saving his friends and the island.  He becomes a martyr and dies a hero, happy but alone.  Everything on the island really happened.  And then we learn that all these flash sideways were actually a flash of their afterlives in some sort of middle world before heaven, and that is why when the characters are touched by someone who meant a lot to them, their lives flash before their eyes.  And though Jack died alone on the island, in the end, he gets to be with all the people he loved.

I think the writers wanted to end it this way because it would have been such a terribly sad and empty ending if Jack just saved everyone and died alone.  They wanted to show that he got to be reunited with everyone and got to be happy in the end; thus why some people, like me, saw the ending as emotionally fulfilling and beautiful.

The one thing I kept thinking about today was that saying, by John Donne, "No man is an island unto himself."  If the island symbolized anything, it was the figurative island we all sometimes think we live on, and the character Jack especially.  We think that we are alone in the world, and nothing we do matters, when in reality, we are not alone, and what we do does matter.  We affect other people, and they affect us, and the connections we make are the most important parts of our lives.  Jack begins on a figurative island, goes to a literal island, and ends in a place where there are no islands, but just people he loves.

That's a good ending.