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Originally Posted by albania
These are all hindsight suggestions.
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Naturally, they are. It's just speculation; unfortunately, we can't ask Dickens if he had originally planned for Oliver Twist to swing with Fagin, or if Hemingway had originally intended to kill off Santiago at the end of The Old Man and the Sea.
The conversation arose from the observation that certain works seem to have a fairy-tale happy ending tacked on and that these endings are less satisfying. It does seem in many cases that authors may have gone that route for the greater social acceptance afforded a happy ending; this naturally leads to the question of 'what would they have written otherwise?'