And okay, fair enough, but there is this unwritten contract between author and reader and I think not ending your book kind of violates that contract.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the expectation readers have for a complete narrative from authors.
In this quote, John Green emphasizes the inherent agreement between authors and their readers that a book should provide a satisfying conclusion. The idea of an 'unwritten contract' suggests that readers invest their time and emotions into a story, and therefore, authors bear a responsibility to honor that investment by delivering a proper ending, making the act of leaving a book unfinished feel like a breach of trust.
In practice
In a book club discussion about narrative endings, this quote can spark a debate on reader expectations.
Always' was a promise! How can you just break the promise?" "Sometimes people don't always understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. Isaac shot me a look. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway. Don't you believe in true love?" I didn't answer. I didn't have an answer. But I thought that if true love did exist, that was a pretty good definition of it.
Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won’t be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because—like all real love stories—it will die with us, as it should.
I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults. I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.
I don't think pandemics make us afraid of death, I think they make us afraid of oblivion. They force us to grapple with the futility of effort. Also they make us barf which isn't fun either... Wash your hands, cover your coughs, and find a way to hold in balance the futility of effort with the necessity to struggle.
So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that's not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren't constantly berating yourself for being sad.
We kiss. Her hands are freezing on my face, and she tastes like coffee and the smell of the onion is still stuck in my nose, and my lips are all dry from the endless winter. And it's awesome.
No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine... But from fifteen to seventeen she was in training for a heroine.
In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogenous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.
Literature is that which he can not read without pain, without choking on truth.
You want in all cases for the story to get through the writing.
Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.
We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.
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