The greatest revelation in a novel often comes, quite understandably, during the end. The context in which this occurs involves releasing underlying knowledge, all of which provides the stage upon where the ultimate truth of everyone’s motives comes forth.
Protagonists that draw on our senses and emotions not only face tough dilemmas and challenges. They also encounter wonderfully treacherous antagonists whose actions force the main character to dig deep within themselves, assess and display their strengths.
Readers come to know a protagonist by the company she or he keeps. In a sense all supporting casts members form a large coalition of antagonists. Each possesses their own motives guiding their thoughts and actions that provide obstacles to the major character reaching her or his goal.
Weakly drawn antagonists provide little fuel to catalyze our major character. Likewise, a well-rounded antagonist, often a close friend of the protagonist, whose goal often mirrors or is the same as the protagonist, fleshes out the major character in a way that readers not only identify with the central character, but root for her or him and feel indelibly bound to her or his survival.
An engaging novel that holds an antagonist possessing aspects of personality that the reader, although not particularly enthralled with her or him, can understand, and with whom the reader, though loyal to the central character, can perhaps even empathize.
This type of antagonist holds motives that must an engaging and tantalizing novel reveals and clarifies during the end of the novel.
The last stage of an entertaining novel thus serves as the canvas, backdrop whereupon the doors of all hearts and souls open providing not only knowledge of what propelled each character to act as she or he did, but to also seek and receive forgiveness.
Through the revelations offered during the denouement and resolution of a novel loose ends become knotted in a moment of redemption that offers a sense of deliverance from the evil that has so haunted the central character.
Grace.
The end of the novel serve as a point where revelations bring the imbalances of good and evil, narcissism and altruism, faith and despair, into alignment.
The reader receives hope in the goodness of humankind, that she or he too can overcome the desires and envy, doubt and worry so plaguing us and grow into a more compassionate person.