Critics' View of Edna's Suicide in The AwakeningThere are many ways to look at Edna's suicide in The Awakening, and each offers a different perspective. It is not necessary for the reader to like the ending of the novel, but they must come to understand it in relation to the story with which it ends. The fact that readers do not like the ending, that they have difficulty making sense of it, is reflected in all the criticisms addressed to the novel: almost all researchers try to explain suicide. Some explanations make more sense than others. By reading them, the reader will better understand the ending of the novel (and, in doing so, the entire novel) and will hopefully make the ending less disappointing. Joseph Urgo reads the novel in terms of Edna learning to tell her own story. He argues that by the end of the novel, she has discovered that her story is "unacceptable in her culture" (23) and that in order to get along in that culture, she must remain silent. Edna rejects this muffling of her voice and would prefer, Urgo asserts, “to extinguish her life rather than modify her story” (23). To save herself from an ending that others would write or from an ending that would compromise what she fought for, she must write her own ending and remove herself from the tale. As she swims, the voices of her children come to attract her like little "antagonists", and there are others on the shore who would also hold her: Robert, Adèle, Arobin and Léonce. Edna finds a way to escape them all and recounts in her suicide the conclusion of her story. In this type of reading, his suicide can be understood in terms of societal pressure. What is the result of silencing a person's voice? Urgo argues, on a symbolic level...... middle of paper ......g Sea': Freedom and drowning in Eliot, Chopin and Drabble." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 12 (1993): 315- 32 .Malzahn, Manfred. “The Strange Disappearance of Edna Pontellier.” Southern Literary Journal 23.2 (1992): 31-39. “The Suicide of Edna Pontellier: An Ambiguous Ending”: 289-98. . Showalter, Elaine. Sister's Choice: Tradition and Change in American Women's Writing. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1991. Skaggs, Peggy "Three Tragic Figures in Kate Chopin's The Awakening 4 (1974): 345-64." . Spangler, George M. "The Awakening: A Partial Dissent" by Kate Chopin." Novel: A Forum on Fiction 3 (1970): 249-55. The Southern Literary Journal 20.1 (1987): 22-32.