Ambiguous Situation / Literature

• Animorphs:
  • In book #16, Jake reluctantly agrees to spare the villain's life as long as he never leaves his mansion again, over Cassie's objections. At the end, we're told that his mansion caught fire soon after. It's deliberately left ambiguous if one of the Animorphs set it, if the villain got out, and if so, if they made good on their threat to kill him.
  • Book #48 ends without telling us whether or not Rachel kills David. Later books even have characters mention that they don't know, either.
• In The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes: What becomes of Lucy Gray Baird who runs off into the woods at the end of the book, never to be seen or heard from again? Does she die when Snow shoots her? Does she live in the woods the rest of her life? Does she make it to what we know is District 13 in the north? The climax takes place in August so it's unlikely she would have been able to make it there by the winter on foot so she might have died trying to get there. She is named after a character from a William Wordsworth poem who disappeared in a snowstorm. Could she have come back to District 12 and lived under an assumed name? That seems unlikely because she is a Hunger Games victor and knew the future President Snow personally but on the other hand it's implied she's related to Katniss from the original books. She'd be the right age to have been her grandmother who's said to have died by the books start but it could have also been her cousin, Maude Ivory. Snow has resigned himself to forgetting about her so her fate is never made clear.
• "The Cask of Amontillado": One of the most discussed aspects of the story is the end when Fortunato gives Montresor no final response before he is walled up completely. Is he too terrified? Or is he refusing to give Montresor any final satisfaction over his death? Even Montresor himself doesn't seem to know.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: Are the brats meeting their comeuppances merely cases of Contrived Coincidence (each winds up in a room with something that appeals to them but turns out to be dangerous), or are they planned in advance by Mr. Willy Wonka? And if so, for what purpose? Although the tour does turns out to be a Secret Test of the kids' virtue or lack thereof, there is no hint given in the novel that Mr. Wonka is intentionally leading these kids into potential/inevitable trouble, and no one remarks upon how odd it is that the Oompa-Loompas' Crowd Songs about them are so specific and elaborate. Given that Mr. Wonka is also marked by his Callousness Towards Emergency and having No Sympathy for the brats, and for being a complete eccentric, he has since become an Interpretative Character with tons of Alternative Character Interpretations and some adaptations of the novel have since played around with this ambiguity but never pinned it down. (In the 2013 musical, Mr. Wonka is Ambiguously Evil and an Anti-Hero at best, with director Sam Mendes admitting that while the character could be a Cool Uncle, he could be also Satan...)
• The Culture: In Surface Detail, the story of a resurrected woman out for revenge against her murderer and a proxy war over the existence of virtual-reality hells converge with the revelation that one of the murderer's business interests is providing processing power to run the hells. The question is, was the woman's Roaring Rampage of Revenge a Contrived Coincidence or was she being used as a catspaw in a Batman Gambit by the officially-neutral Culture?
• Dortmunder: Whether the author's Darker and Edgier Parker novels exist as a fictional series in this universe or they are part of a Shared Universe with a different Parker novel series existing can be hard to tell.
  • The DKA File novel series crosses over with both Parker and Dortmunder in separate books, but there are some notable tonal differences between those two DKA books that might cause Fanon Discontinuity between them.
  • Kelp reading Parker novels is a key part of Jimmy the Kid, but Parker is involved in kidnapping for ransom (a racket he repeatedly criticizes and views as beneath him in his own series), making the fictional Parker book Kelp reads feel like it's from a different series.
  • Several Parker universe characters are name-dropped in Dortmunder books, but whether their names are meant to indicate a shared continuity or are just used as gags is unclear.
    • Alan Greenwood from the first and fourth books adapts the alias of Alan Grofield (a character in the Parker books) but works as a television actor while Grofield loathes that profession, making this likely more of a Shout-Out.
    • General Ripper Banana Republic President Juan Pozos from the first and third Grofield spinoff novels is the target of a coup attempt as a subplot in Good Behavior.
    • In Bank Shot, Herman X tells Dortmunder's gang that he recently pulled a job with Stan Devers, Mort Kobler, and George Cathcart. Devers is a recurring Parker character, Kobler is a heister in the Parker novel The Outfit, and Catchcart and Alan Grofield both listen to (and reject) a robbery recruitment pitch in the Grofield spinoff Lemons Never Lie.
• In Dragon Bones, Garranon is the king's "favourite" and it is left ambiguous whether he is actually gay/bi or just does it for the political power. It is clear that he despises the king, but he does enjoy the sex to some extent, though he does it only to protect his family.
• José María Eguren: In "Ananké", is the girl the aforementioned Greek goddess of fate? Or is she an Anthropomorphic Personification of virtue itself? The text of the poem strongly implies the latter but the title and some verses favor the former.
• Epithet Erased: Prison of Plastic: Near the end of the book, it is revealed that much of Lorelai's trauma and fear stems from a belief that she may have been the one to start the fire that killed her and Molly's mother years ago, thanks to a case of using her powers in her sleep. This belief is backed up by the fact that no one could find out what the source of the fire was, and so she's spent years worrying a repeat of the incident could happen to Molly or her father. Another character, attempting to help talk them through their fears, admits that there's a good possibility that this might have been the case.
• "The Events at Poroth Farm": Sarr's last line in the story, "Sometimes we forget to blink", alerts Jeremy to the fact that he is possessed. It is kept ambiguous whether the creature was just taunting Jeremy or whether Sarr managed to resist its influence long enough to warn Jeremy of the danger he's in.
• Fatherland ends with March trapped in a standoff at the former site of Auschwitz, surrounded by Gestapo agents. As he draws his weapon, he imagines Charlie successfully managing to deliver the evidence to the US, though even he admits it's an unlikely possibility.
• From a Buick 8 has multiple examples because the story is based around the idea that you'll never have all the answers. Is the Buick alive? Intelligent? Did it kill Curtis and more.
• In Hooway for Wodney Wat, the protagonist is an anthropomorphic little boy rat with Elmuh Fudd Syndwome. When the school gets a new student named Katie, who's an Insufferable Genius, Rodney is chosen as Simon in "Simon Says" and says something that sounds like "Wodney says go west", and Katie walks off westward, while the others presume he mispronounced "rest" and try to take a nap. Then, they cheer him on for getting rid of Katie. Did Rodney really mispronounce "rest", or was he actually saying, "West" to get rid of Katie, knowing that his other classmates would presume it to be a mispronunciation?
• Horatio Hornblower: Lieutenant Hornblower is the only book of the series written from the POV of a character other than Hornblower (in this case, newly-assigned Lieutenant Bush). Captain Sawyer falls down a hatchway and is put in a coma. Through the course of the book, it's unclear if he fell by accident or if he was pushed by either a much-abused midshipman or Hornblower himself. Things are not made more clear by Hornblower appointing himself head of the investigation in the confusion caused by the power vacuum, nor by his insistence that they press on a planned attack on a Spanish fort, keeping everyone too occupied to look into things too closely. By the end of the book, the Captain is killed in a Spanish attack on the ship, the authorities refuse to probe into the matter for the sake of Sawyer's reputation (it should be noted that he had started to go mad), and the Midshipman is mentioned in the denouement as being lost in a storm a few months later during the Peace of Amiens, meaning only Hornblower may know the truth, and is keeping it to himself.
• The Hunger Games: Since the story is told through Katniss' eyes, we don't witness the scene where Peeta goes back to "finish" the girl from District 8 who started the fire. Did he deliver a Mercy Kill and/or did he find her dying and hold her hand in her last moments?
• In The Jungle Book, Mowgli, who was Raised by Wolves since he was a toddler, is taken in by Messua, whose son Nathoo was apparently eaten by a tiger as a toddler. Messua wants to believe that Mowgli is Nathoo, and acts as though he is, but it's not clear to either her or the reader is that's true.
• King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table: The final fate of Ragnell, and whether or not she and Gawain are Percivale's parents. At the opening of the Round Table, Merlin says that "the bravest knight now sitting here" would be Percivale's father — which, as Launcelot had yet to arrive, would seem to indicate Gawain. However, ultimately it is left ambiguous.
  Some say that [Ragnell] died, but others that she fled away into the deep forests of Wales and there bore a son to Sir Gawain who in time became one of the noblest of all the Knights of the Round Table; but whether that son's name was Percivale the old tales do not tell us. Some call him simply 'The Fair Unknown' – but his adventures were so like those of Percivale that we may well believe that in a tale now lost this was indeed the name of the son of Sir Gawain and the Lady Ragnell.
• The Lady, or the Tiger?, by Frank R. Stockton, is an example of Morton's Fork where the final decision and its result is never revealed. The tendency of people to bug the author to tell them which was the real ending prompted its sequel The Discourager of Hesitancy in which a group of characters who ask are told that they shall find out the answer once they can answer an equally ambiguously ended story.
• Leviathan has one of these concerning the Goliath. Is it a fake, a delusion, or does it call down Nickel-Iron asteroids through magnetic force? Since it's totally destroyed, there is no clear answer.
• Love Letters to the Dead: It's never made clear whether or not May's death was an accident, as Laurel isn't sure whether she jumped off the bridge, let herself fall, or was knocked into the river by the wind.
• In The Machineries of Empire, just what is going on with Jedao, as well as Kel Command's plans regarding him and Kel Cheris, are left unclear until the first book's ending.
• In the children's book The Magic Word, when a boy is asked to say the "magic word", he says, "alakazoomba" instead of "please". The narrator says that nobody knows whether the boy did it as a joke, because he was bored of being asked for the magic word, or what.
• In the short story "Mariam", an elderly woman named Mariam happens to meet a Creepy Child who is also named Mariam. What, exactly, the younger Mariam is is never explained. She is able to coerce the older Mariam into giving over a prized brooch and adopting her, but never actually does anything threatening or forceful to get those things. When the older Mariam goes to get her neighbors to help her get the kid out of her apartment, they can't find her. And the last line ("Hello," said Mariam) doesn't specify if it's the elderly Mariam speaking, or if the younger Mariam has returned.
• In My Cousin Rachel, the titular Rachel is either an evil Femme Fatale who poisoned her first husband Ambrose in a failed attempt to inherit his estate and tried to do the same to the estate's inheritor Philip after seducing him or an innocent woman who was unfairly maligned by Ambrose when he began going mad from a brain tumor that eventually killed him and Philip falling ill in her care was just a coincidence. The book ends with her dying and Philip being none the wiser on whether she truly was evil or not.
• Nineteen Eighty-Four actually contains an often overlooked appendix that refers to Newspeak in the past tense, implying the Party will in fact fall eventually. Of course, this isn't technically part of the story and Word of God said it was open to interpretation if the Party does eventually fall. This isn't even getting into most of the story with how the Party keeps changing facts leaving it ambiguous as to what is truly real or not.
• In One Cool Friend, it's revealed to the reader that Elliot's father is totally fine with his son keeping a penguin and himself has a giant tortoise. How much he knew about Magellan and whether Elliot was trying to sneak the penguin around are both left ambiguous.
• In A Passage to India what really happens to Adela is never explained, the reader is left to draw their own conclusion. We'll never know what the author intended becuase Forster refused to say during his life.
• Pavlov's Dogs has a major character killed on screen, but is seemingly resurrected. The characters are caught between the belief it's an imposter, the actual person, and even mental instability setting in.
• Peek-a-Boo Poo: In the second book, it's said to be unknown if Heidi pooped in the real-estate man's hat just out of laziness, or as a game.
• Radiance has The Summation scene, in which Anchises calls together characters who were still alive and well (Percy and Erasmo), characters who were dead (Horace, Anchises's parents, etc.), Severin herself (with her fate completely unknown at the time), and several animated cartoon characters and an in-universe fictional one. The deceased characters were able to explain the unclear circumstances behind their demise and one of the cartoon characters is able to give a lot of answers related to callowwhales (largely mysterious beings which, unbeknownst to the film crew, was what they'd been standing on before dying and disappearing). The entire scene is presented as the resolution to Percy's movie, intended to give a fictional explanation for Severin's disappearance and thus provide Percy with some closure. The transcript of the film reel in the last chapter, however, implies that everything was correct after all... despite Percy having no way of knowing that.
• Ramona Quimby:
  • In one book, the Quimby sisters are made to cook dinner as punishment for being Picky Eaters. They make a dish that they themselves dislike, but which the parents claim to like. The narration and the actual sisters speculate on whether the parents actually liked the dinner, or if they were pretending to like it to spare their daughters' feelings, without ever coming to a conclusion.
  • Ramona Forever has Aunt Bea's relationship with the unseen Michael. He's apparently invited her to go skiing together, and the sisters assume that they're dating. Halfway through the book, it is revealed that Bea is actually dating and is about to marry Howie's Uncle Hobart, and the girls (and the readers) never learn what happened to Michael, or if he was even dating Bea in the first place.
• The short story "Recitatif" by Toni Morrison focuses on two women named Twyla and Roberta. It’s made clear by the story that one of them is white and the other is African-American, but it’s deliberately ambiguous which of them is which race. Morrison herself described the story as "the removal of all racial codes from a narrative about two characters of different races for whom racial identity is crucial".
• Safehold has more than one such a case:
  • The discrepancy between the Frederic Androcles Schueler in the Holy Writ, whose book contains the instructions for the Inquisition to find and punish heretics, including many, many methods of Cold-Blooded Torture, or the version of Scheuler contained in records within the Key, a Wylsynn family heirloom, which shows a good and compassionate Archangel, goes unexplained, despite the two having very different personalities and approaches to one problem.
  • It's unknown what happened to Ark's last ship, Hamilcar.
  • Is Clyntahn a raving lunatic Believing His Own Lies, or is he cynically playing the part? Most fans seem convinced of the former, although characters in-story wonder about it. When the truth of Safehold's history is revealed to him just before his execution, it's revealed to be the former. He's utterly broken with the realization everything he had done and justified as doing for the good of the people was based on a lie.
  • The War Against the Fallen. Who fought in it? What were their agendas? Which mindset actually won? Who were the "demons"? Was it a civil war between the Langhornites, or a war between them and the "fallen"?
• Shaman Blues: An in-universe example, as Witkacy spends some time in the first half of the novel wondering whether Katia is his girlfriend, his more-than-girlfriend, his friend or his ex, as she's sending him mixed signals and has recently left the country. Finally resolved halfway through, when it turns out they're Amicable Exes.
• A Simple Survey has a number of short stories that end before giving a clear resolution. For example, one story is about how humans have developed technology that allows them to see into hell, which appears as a pleasant beach resort. A demon tells the narrator that, although they were instructed by God to torment sinners, the inherent nature of demons is to rebel against divine authority, so hell is in fact a nice place. However, an angel then interrupts and claims that this is a lie, to trick humans into wanting to enter hell voluntarily.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: Queen's Shadow hints that Quarsh and Mariek Panaka's marriage isn't going to last, but never definitively confirms this. Their relationship is stated to have become strained due to a disagreement regarding the installation of an ion pulse for planetary defence (Mariek supports it, Quarsh doesn't think it's a strong enough measure), and in the epilogue, Mariek is stated to have not appeared alongside Quarsh when he made his first address to the people of Naboo as their new Imperial Moff, implying she may have left him due to his support of the Empire.
• The Story of O: Is the main relationship simply Casual Kink and Property of Love, or is it Destructive Romance/Romanticized Abuse? The novel exists in two versions. These versions have very different endings, casting the rest of the story in very different light. In the most popular version (which most adaptations are built on), the first option might be the most likely. In the alternative version, the second option is far more likely. That version of the novel ends with the protagonist and her boyfriend agreeing that she should commit suicide... and she does.
• In The Twilight Saga, Embry is seemingly unrelated to the Quileute tribe—he moved to the reservation with his single mother as a kid. But then he becomes a shapeshifter, despite that being a power that seemingly only occurs in certain Quileute bloodlines. This means that his father must have been one of the men from these families (all of whom were married, and are fathers of the other werewolves), but we never find out whom. Extra materials imply that it was Sam's dad.
• Wearing the Cape: The question of what exactly Kitsune is comes up multiple times, and an answer is hinted at more than once, before Hope eventually decides there's no way she's ever going to know for sure. Especially since Kitsune himself clearly finds it hilarious to keep her guessing.
  • Answer 1: He's a normal Breakthrough, an ordinary human who gained extraordinary powers in a Traumatic Superpower Awakening. His powers were shaped by his belief in the guardian kitsune of his home village, and he was deluded enough to truly believe that he was the kitsune. This, it should be noted, is the official explanation that most governments and scientists go with for any seemingly supernatural Breakthroughs. It's the answer that makes it easiest for them to sleep at night.
  • Answer 2: A dying villager had a Breakthrough in his last moments and created a physical manifestation of the guardian kitsune, with all the attendant powers, abilities, and personality. Hope has met another projection who outlived his creator, and this explanation also explains where a particular angry ghost came from.
  • Answer 3: He is the actual guardian kitsune, possibly even the one from the famous Japanese folktale about the peasant's new wife. This is the explanation that many Japanese people believe about all the guardian kami that have popped up since the Event, though it's not explained where they were before that. Kitsune certainly has powers and knowledge that would be odd at best if he was merely a Breakthrough or a product of a Breakthrough.
• A Wild Last Boss Appeared!:
  • It's not quite clear if Ruphas' world is an entirely distinct one in its own right that influenced the protagonist and the game or if the background details of the game and taking things to their logical conclusions caused it to become more complex than the protagonist thinks it should be. Basically, what really happened with, say, Aries' recruitment? Did Ruphas Mafahl find a legendary but weak sheep monster and teach it to stand up for itself before adopting it or did a random Japanese teenager find a rare spawn monster that just sat around looking dopey until he started taming it, causing it to ineffectually attack him once before submitting?
  • Exactly what happened to the soul of Ruphas' creator? Is he merely sharing the body with the soul of Ruphas? Are they merging or overlapping? Is he in danger of disappearing into Ruphas? Are his memories and feelings actually his own or are they mere fabrications so that a clueless persona will control the body and fool Alovenus into underestimating Ruphas?
• Winnie the Pooh: In "In Which Pooh Invents a New Game and Eeyore Joins In", Tigger makes a strange coughing sound, leaps forward (refferred to by Tigger as "boffing"; a portmanteu of "bouncing" and "coughing"), and knocks Eeyore into the river. Eeyore believes that Tigger "bounced" him into the river on purpose as a joke (since that is his sense of humour) but Tigger maintains that he did it by accident due to the cough. We never find out who's right, Christopher Robin refuses to take a side, and Pooh and Piglet debate among themselves what happened.
• The Witch of Knightcharm: After orientation at an evil Wizarding School, an older student named Rebecca says they have to get stronger because of 'what's coming' and another older student named Lauren warns Rebecca not to tell a younger student Emily (whom Lauren is mentoring) some secret which Emily failed to notice during the last orientation run. It has not yet been explained what either of them are talking about.
• The Witchlands: It's made very unclear just what the deal with prince Leopold and his co-conspirators are. Do they actually have Safi's best interests in mind? What is their plan, actually? Is it still going, or did the ending of Truthwitch send it completely off the rails? Bloodwitch partially explains things with the reveal that at least part of the conspirators intend to assassinate the various imperial leaders to prevent another war, but leaves Leopold's personal role unclear.

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