How could a reading end without an ending? Sounds crazy, right? An ending its not just the last sentences of any reading, it can be the most important part of the literary work. The ending of a reading has great importance and value. It will always tell us something that is key for understanding the theme and I think that it is said by telling us about effect of the plot on the characters. And this effect on the characters helps us find the theme of the story.
Every story has at least one character, and the plot goes around this character, and you are the whole story following and knowing him and there has to be a moment when something special happens to this character. After this special thing, he is affected somehow and responds to it in a certain way. Then at the end of the story we can see how much the plot influenced the character and his feelings about what happened. We can see if the character learned something about the plot like in the stories A & P and Araby. Or the opposite, if the character's really cared about what happened like in Soldier's Home. We can also see how much the plot really affected the characters like in Guests of the Nation.
In the ending of A & P Sammy decided to quit his job just to impress the girls and he regretted it almost immediately. We can know this because he thought at that moment that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through it. After quitting his job he left the store thinking that the girls were going to wait for him as their hero and this was not the case, nobody was waiting for him. He did all this for nothing. We can see the feeling of how ashamed he is of himself at the last sentence that says: "His face (the boss) was dark and gray and his back stiff, as if he"d just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter". We could see clearly the feeling of the character and what he learned.
