Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael Ondaatje

Closure is the tidy lie we keep demanding from messy lives, and Michael Ondaatje refuses to sell it. When he says he doesn’t see novels ending with any “real sense of closure,” he’s not shrugging at craft; he’s declaring allegiance to a different kind of truth. The line pushes back against the Victorian hangover that a story should click shut like a well-made box, moral accounted for, loose ends knotted, the world returned to order. Ondaatje’s work has always been suspicious of that order.

The intent is almost tactical: keep the reader living in the aftermath. His novels (The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost) are built from shards - memory, war, migration, desire - forces that don’t resolve so much as reconfigure. “Real” is the tell here. He’s admitting that closure, when it appears, is often a narrative effect, not an emotional fact. Characters may reach a stopping point, but history doesn’t. Trauma doesn’t. Love rarely does.

Subtextually, the quote is also a quiet manifesto about power. Closure can be a kind of authority: the author-as-judge, declaring what matters and what’s settled. Ondaatje prefers the ethics of uncertainty, letting ambiguity stand as a more honest mirror of human experience. The reader isn’t handed a verdict; they’re handed responsibility.

Context matters, too: a postmodern and postcolonial literary landscape where grand, final answers feel compromised. In Ondaatje’s hands, the ending becomes less a door slamming than a horizon line - a limit of the page, not of the story.