Note: This is a Spoilered Rotten trope, that means that EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE on this list is a spoiler by default and most of them will be unmarked. This is your last warning; only proceed if you really believe you can handle this list.
Times where The Ending Changes Everything in Literature.
General:
- The Fight Club, The Prestige, Shutter Island, and American Psycho examples from Live-Action Films all carry over from their original books' endings.
By Author:
- Clifford Simak loved writing novels with an important reveal on the last page:
- All Flesh Is Grass: Flowers try very hard to help humans. They don't want any recompense, or so they claim. The Reveal: they simply enjoy being loved for what they look like — beautiful flowers. No alien race has ever done this before.
- Time and Again: The hero's life's work won't be liked by many humans. Instead they would publish a "revised edition" that insists on Humanity's superiority. Exactly how popular is the original edition? The Reveal: none of the hero's friends are real humans. He's doing what's right, rather than what humans would like, and if he knew that, he may abandon the work. (Note that this novel was published under several names with different endings.)
- Werewolf Principle: There's no place for the hero on the future Earth. He's going to leave it forever to study new worlds. This entails losing his newly-found love and lonely immortality. The Reveal: she is a similar android who has to leave Earth for the same reason, making Downer Ending a Bittersweet Ending. Then her uplifting speech about the importance of their work arguably turns it into a Happy Ending.
- Space Engineers: Less drastic change, making the happy ending even better. Our universe is populated by Starfish Aliens who can hardly communicate with Engineers and cannot help. The similarities between humans and Engineers are too many to be coincidental. The Reveal: Engineers were created as servants by the same race that created life on Earth and programmed the evolution of mankind. Everything they've created so far should and will belong to humans — when humans become mature enough.
- Ring Around the Sun: The hero's arch-nemesis and the only man capable of thwarting the good guys' plans is his clone.note To stop the upcoming war the hero just has to tell him everything and invite his brother to join.
- Out of Their Minds: The Devil seems to represent the unanimous opinion of imaginary creatures. The Reveal (not on the last page, though): he does not. Others will force him to leave humans alone.
By Title:
- Akashic Records of Bastard Magic Instructor has this in the side story "Heavens, the Lonesome Witch". It initially seems like a standard story in which an Ineffectual Loner (Celica) meets up with a kid (named Glenn Radars) that will help her out of her shell and make her more social. The reader expects that Celica will adopt Glenn and raise him to become the protagonist of the main series, who has the same name. But towards the end, it's revealed that Glenn was an undead thrall of a Lich, sent to lure Celica into a trap. Celica kills the Lich and her thralls, then discovers an amnesiac boy in the basement. It is this boy that Celica adopts and names Glenn.
- American Gods: The "war" between the old gods and the new that drives most of the plot turns out to have been arranged by Wednesday and Loki, ostensibly on opposite sides, to draw power from the battle.
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is legendary for this trope. A man who attempted to sabotage the titular bridge during the American Civil War is captured by Union soldiers and hanged... but the rope snaps and he falls into the river. He makes his way home, but just as his wife embraces him... CRACK! The entire story from the moment the soldiers hanged him was a Dying Dream that happened in the seconds between the drop and the snap.
- ''Are You Too Late Or Am I Too Early", a short story by John Collier. Together with the narrator (who's also the protagonist) we're trying to figure out who the mysterious woman in his house is... only to find out that said narrator is actually a ghost haunting that very house. The amazing thing is how blatantly obvious it becomes on re-reading.
- Atonement by Ian McEwan is an odd example, in that Briony, the story's narrator, directly addresses the reader and says she had to give the story a Happy Ending to instead of letting them simply die, as happened in real life. This is actually the point of her book, since she hopes to atone for her actions that kept them apart by reuniting them in fiction.
- In Bad Monkeys, Jane is being interviewed by a psychiatrist after being arrested, and she claims that she is part of the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons, or "Bad Monkeys". At the end, it is revealed at the end that Jane is The Mole for the Nebulous Evil Organization known as The Troop and that her psychiatrist is her brother Phil, previously thought to be dead, and he is The Mole.
- The end of The Basic Eight reveals that one of the main characters, Natasha Hyatt, is a figment of our narrator's imagination. When reading back again, there are clues scattered everywhere and the Mind Screw is taken up to eleven. Coupled with the fact Flannery is a unreliable narrator...
- In Big Brother by Lionel Shriver, the narrator admits at the end that the second half the of the story never happened. She concocted a story for herself and the reader, where she went to great lengths to rescue her obese brother and help him lose hundreds of pounds that he inevitably regains, showing her efforts and sacrifice to have been futile. In fact, she put him on the plane back to New York and only saw him one more time before he died of obesity-related complications a couple of years later. The story she has told the reader is a desperate attempt to cope with her own guilt and determine if there was anything she could have done to help her brother.
- The novella Borges and the Eternal Orangutans, about a Locked Room Mystery, a murder similar to the one described in Murders On The Rue Morgue, taking place during an Edgar Allan Poe fan convention. The killer turns out to be the narrator, who made up literary clues to drive suspicion away from himself. The first chapter mentions his first short story featured an Unreliable Narrator.
- In Ian R. MacLeod's short story "The Camping Wainwrights", the father of the titular family is established as a sociopathic subtle abuser who does bizarre things like breaking the family's possessions for no reason, keeping his wife and children miserable and terrified. At the end, he gets what he deserves. Then it is revealed that the narrator's sister performed at least one of the mysterious acts of cruelty that were blamed on the father, raising the possibility that he may have been an innocent scapegoat of the family's general dysfunction.
- The last words of Mickey Spillane's The Deep. Deep goes back to his old neighborhood to settle some score. Then the authorities show up and someone says, "Good job, Lieutenant."
- Randall Garrett's short story "Despoilers of the Golden Empire" appears to be Science Fiction set in the far future, being about an imperialistic invasion force using vastly advanced technology to overpower and subjugate an empire native to a Death World to take the natural resource they possess in great quantities. The last sentence reveals that while heavy on SF tropes, it is something else entirely: it's not so much sci-fi as a narrative of the conquest of the Incan empire thanks to a lot of Exact Words.
- William Gibson's and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine has a fairly interesting twist of this kind, although it doesn't really call into question previous events so much as how the reader was perceiving them. The reader's point-of-view was the perspective of an AI in the Alternate History's future analyzing past events to learn how it came about. Everything - the titles of the chapters, the structure of the writing (which seems stilted, almost bureaucratic at times), the descriptions of the world - it all plays into it.
- The Empyrean: The ending of the first book, Fourth Wing, reveals that the protagonist Violet Sorrengail's older brother Brennan is alive and a member of the revolution against Navarre's corrupt government. Not only does that change the reader's perspective of Violet's initial relationship with her love interest Xaden Riorson (who is also a member of the revolution, was aware Brennan was alive and is his ally, and whose father was allegedly the one that killed Brennan), but it also casts a new light on Violet and Brennan's parents, and just how much they knew about the truth of Brennan's death.
- Everything, Everything: Madeline doesn't really have SCID. Once you know that, previous events suddenly seem much, much worse. It's especially hard not to question everything Dr. Whittier has said or done up until that point once you realize she was lying about basically everything.
- Done many times in Goosebumps. A recurring one is that the focus character wasn't human or the setting wasn't Earth, which everyone but the reader already knew.
- During a break in the Final Battle of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, our hero witnesses a Pensieve Flashback provided by the recently murdered Severus Snape. What he sees in one chapter sheds a whole new light on everything that Snape did over the course of the series, especially his killing of Albus Dumbledore.
- I Am the Cheese: We find out the protagonist is insane and his escape on his bicycle is something he's done several times, with the Big Bad's people waiting for him at the end of every journey.
- The ending to Iron Widow begins shaping up to be very bittersweet (with more emphasis on bitter than sweet), with the Zhou province conquered, Emperor Qin Zheng having been brought back, and the truth about the pilot system being brought to light, but one of Wu Zetian's partners Li Shimin was killed during the final battle due to two of the other pilots betraying them. When Zetian arrives back at Chang'an, she declares herself empress to the terrified public, and prepares to rule Huaxia with her surviving partner Yizhi. Then, the short Epilogue chapter drops two bombshells: when Zetian returns to the battlefield to recover Shimin's body, she finds it missing, and receives a message from Yizhi telling her that the Hunduns (the alien invaders that the characters have been fighting who supposedly destroyed previous human civilization) are actually the natives of the planet, and the humans are the invaders. Then, the communication gets interrupted by a message from the gods, telling Zetian that while they are upset with her actions, they are impressed by her power, and offer to make a deal with her; if she follows their instructions, they could bring back Shimin, but they warn her that if she defies them, she will "lose everything". The weight of these revelations cause Zetian to break down screaming.
- In Chesterton's poem Lepanto, John of Austria's Historical Hero Upgrade seems to be played straight, until the last verses, where Chesterton talks about the other famous guy who was at the battle and the kind of book he wrote seems to subvert the trope.Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.) - Let Me Call You Sweetheart: The revelation of the killer's identity in the climax changes the context of several scenes. Before it looked like Jonathan was trying to warn Kerry off the Sweetheart Murder Case because he was concerned she would pointlessly derail her career. The revelation that he's the killer makes it clear this is the real reason he didn't want Kerry looking into the case, although he (initially) didn't want to have to harm Kerry to silence her, either.
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel tells the story of a boy on a lifeboat after a shipwreck along with a fully-grown tiger and includes other bizarre occurrences. At the end he gives an alternate, more horrifying but less fantastic version of events to the people he's telling the story too, leaving it to them (and us) to decide which to believe. The in-story listeners believe the story with the tiger.
- The Maze Runner: Ava Paige's epilogue in The Death Cure shows that she is still devoted to WICKED's cause, even after having turned on most of them. She altered WICKED's mission objectives in a way that put her on the protagonists' side, though, and she was genuinely sorry for some of the things she did. The same epilogue also implies that Brenda and Jorge were following her orders to the end.
- In Moriarty we follow the story of Detective Chase on the search to find an American crime-boss that is attempting to take over the role of the titular character who has recently been killed by Holmes. Only it turns out Moriarty isn't dead and is in-fact Chase himself; he's be forced into hiding and is using the police in a last ditch attempt to take out the crime-bosses making a play.
- In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, the narrator himself is the murderer and he has been hiding that the entire time. He also points out how clever and careful he acted and wrote this all down which serves as a Once More, with Clarity moment. What's notable about this is that he never actually lies, he just leaves out some important parts in his written account of the events. Of course, Hercule Poirot noticed those, but the reader probably didn't.
- Odd Thomas throws a twist in the last few pages that negates the previous few chapters, or at least our interpretations of them. His girlfriend Stormy was actually a ghost, having died in an explosion, and the interactions he'd had with her were wishful thinking on his part.
- The revelations at the end of The Player of Games, revealing just how thoroughly Special Circumstances has been manipulating the situation. And then you find out that Gurgeh's drone companion and the drone who blackmailed him into accepting the assignment in the first place are the same drone.
- Real Quick Flash Fic has a short story where a girl is being hunted ruthlessly down...then it turns out it was just a game of hide and seek.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events concludes its thirteen book run by twisting how you view the very reason why the books were even written in the first place with the final word of the entire series: Beatrice. A few chapters before then, A Series of Unfortunate Events turns out to exist within A Series of Unfortunate Events. Confused? Let's explain: Beatrice turns out to have been the Baudelaires' mother, and she had dated Lemony before marrying the kids' father. Lemony is recording the kids' misadventures partly out of curiosity about his lover's children and also to add their stories to the ASoUE book that records all the lives of those who washed up on the island, including himself.
- H. P. Lovecraft's novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth is about a tourist stranded in an eerie fishing town whose residents keep a terrible secret: they are the Half-Human Hybrid spawn of a race of Fish People! He escapes them and notifies the authorities, who raid the town, send the inhabitants to concentration camps, and launch torpedoes at their undersea city. Months afterwards, the narrator discovers that his ancestry derives from those people - and as he begins the physical transformation into one of them, his perspective and allegiance shift to theirs, as The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body.
- Someone Like Me: The final paragraph confirms that the narrator Tas is blind.
- The Dale Brown novel Starfire is centred on the efforts of Bradley McLanahan and his team to invent the eponymous orbital solar power collector that transmits energy to an earthbound receiver via microwaves, which the Russians take physically violent objection to partly out of the concern that it can be weaponised. The US does eventually end up militarising it in self-defense against the Russians' attack on the space station it's mounted on. The epilogue has the people who gave Bradley the idea reveal that, contrary to what both the inventors and the audience thought, the orbital microwave laser was the primary purpose after all, with the peaceful power transmission just being a secondary benefit.
- The final chapter of The Stone Sky reveals the reason the entire Broken Earth trilogy has been narrated in the second person: because Hoa is narrating the events of the trilogy to the stone eater he made from Essun in the hopes that it will help that stone eater to become Essun. It changes the meaning of a lot of the narration from throughout the trilogy.
- The Thirteenth Tale is narrated by one of the characters. Near the end, she reveals that she's been combining two different people into one.
- Words of Radiance (second book of The Stormlight Archive):
- The last Shallan flashback puts the rest of them in a completely new perspective. Her entire backstory is about her family being crushed by her insane, abusive father, starting with when he murdered his wife. Then in her last flashback we find out that Shallan killed her mother when her mother tried to kill her for being a Surgebinder. Her father took the blame, Shallan retreated into herself, and her father started going insane with stress and paranoia. Where the flashbacks had originally made it seem that Shallan was the only one of his children that he truly loved, the twist makes it clear that his tender treatment of her was because he was terrified of her and didn't want to do anything to provoke her!
- In a more minor example, the revelation that Shen/Rlain was not an ordinary parshman but a Parshendi spy in dullform may lead the reader to reassess some of their assumptions about parshmen, given that he was the main example we have seen in detail up to now.
