Research Paper on:
Ending Ambiguity in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
and then leave us without closure in some ways, offering us many possibilities. Two short stories which clearly offer us ambiguous endings are "Sweat" and "The Gilded Six-Bits." In the  following paper we examine the two stories, discussing the ambiguous endings in each one. Sweat This particular story is about a black woman who is not only physically  abused by her husband, but also psychologically abused. It is a tragic story of a woman who works incredibly hard keeping bills paid and the house kept up, while her  husband flaunts himself around town and flaunts himself with other women. He does not try to hide these women from his wife and he takes every opportunity to tell her  how she is ugly and no good. Despite the fact that this is a very tragic tale of a womans struggle, it is also a tale of how this  one woman began to have the courage to stand up to this man. In fact, it seems that the abuse, the physical at least, is now a thing of the  past. The abuse seems to have stopped the moment she picked up a frying pan and dared him to come at her. In this we begin to see a woman  who will stand on her own and no longer stand for physical abuse. Her husband, however, subconsciously knows that he has no power over her physically anymore and he  begins to increase the psychological abuse. He knows that she cannot control how she reacts to such taunts, especially taunts that involve snakes. And, it is with this type of  taunting that he will essentially get what is coming to him, offering us the ambiguous ending. Her husband meets her one day, at the entrance to their kitchen, with