This book was quite a ride (for everyone involved)! As I read it I took note of certain things, and have typed them out for you all to read. Let me know if you thought of something similar while reading this book, or if you have questions, and especially if you disagree with me on some point; I love discussing books, and would be more than happy to do that, especially with this book, which was so engrossing.
I should start off with what I made of the book. I understand that there are several schools of thought regarding what actually happened in this book, and for my annotations to make sense, you need to know my views on things. Obviously, there will be spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t read this book, go do so!
So, here’s my take: Jake and The Girlfriend (TG) are going on a road trip to Jake’s parent’s house. TG reflects on the car ride over that she is thinking of breaking up with Jake (hence, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”), because she feels like they aren’t connecting in the ways a couple should- but she hasn’t quite made up her mind. When they get to his parent’s house, which is a farmhouse, TG immediately feels like something is off. She finds framed photos of herself as a child in the house, when she goes to the bathroom her slippers move on their own, and Jake’s parents give her the creeps (and just aren’t good at dinner table small-talk). After Jake and TG depart, they stop at a Dairy Queen for frozen lemonade, where they are greeted by 3 very unusual servers. After that, they go to an abandoned school to throw away the cups, in which they are ultimately trapped in and separated by a creepy custodian. The custodian chases TG and Jake around the school for hours, until TG finds herself in the janitor’s closet waiting for him. This is the point where all the pronouns are mushed together, and we readers find out that Jake and TG are the same person. Then the custodian finds them/him in the closet, and merges his consciousness with theirs (because he is also Jake and TG) slowly kills all of them with a wire hanger, committing suicide and “ending things.”
Now, I think that every character in this book was manifested by the janitor (who I’m assuming is named Jake), and is a side of the janitor himself. Not just the 3 in the closet at the end. I think that Jake has a severe multiple personality disorder, and became suicidal, so he made up a whole trip to his parent’s house and place of work in order to rationalize killing himself. I think that while he was at work at the school, Jake mentally drove himself and his imaginary girlfriend to his dead parent’s farm, and then took himself on a trip down memory lane by exploring his room, the farm, and the basement, but through TG’s eyes. He then left and drove to Dairy Queen, where he got some drinks for himself and TG. Then he mentally drove to his school to throw away the cups, which was his way of explaining why Jake stopped at the school, which would eventually lead to his and the janitor’s death, which was the goal. But physically, I think Jake/the janitor was at the school the entire time.
The book vaguely clarifies that TG was never a girlfriend of the janitor Jake, but was instead a girl he met in a bar many years ago and then became obsessed with. I believe that that is true. That would explain her namelessness (Jake never got her name in the bar), and her presence in the imaginary car ride. But I think that the only part of TG that was borrowed from her real life person was her looks; I think Jake made up his own personality for her that would satisfy his suicidal fantasy, and actually made her the manifestation of his suicidal thoughts, which is why she was the one “thinking of ending things.”
Now that we’ve covered my basic opinions, let’s get to the annotations:
1. The most obvious: the nosebleed in the bathroom. Though I am a complete novice to the horror genre, do nosebleeds ever signify something good for the characters? It seems like nosebleeds are a common omen of things going downhill. This particular nosebleed reminded me of one in the Netflix show, The OA (stellar show by the way. I highly recommend it). In the show, the main character gets nosebleeds as a form of premonition, and after not getting one in years, finds herself with a nosebleed as a warning of impending danger (I won’t spoil what it is, but I sincerely hope you watch the show and find out).
2. Twos. Twos are all over this book, it seems: Jake+the girlfriend, the dead lambs, the dead pigs, the parents, the number of cars on the road is never more than two, the original servers at DQ were only 2, two lemonades at DQ, the number of cars at the school (supposedly. Jake and the janitor drove the same car, so there was really only one car, but TG saw two… It’s really just a confusing worm hole there), and my copy of the book has the sentence “I’m thinking of ending things” written twice. I think twos play an important role in the book. Possibly because threes represent balance in literature, so by nature twos would represent being unbalanced and unstable (and the whole point of the book was to feel ‘unbalanced’ or ‘uneasy’)
3. The “police lineup” comment from the girlfriend, when she was saying she could pick Jake out of a police lineup based on his walk. What a weird thing to say! Why did she automatically place Jake in a police lineup as a place she’d have to identify him? Why not a grocery store, or a fair, or a parade? Or literally anything other than a police lineup? (This thought gets even more confusing when you take on the fact that Jake and the girlfriend are the same person, which leads to the question: why would Jake need to pick himself out of a police lineup? For all the indecision throughout the book about whether TG made up her mind to end things or not, I think the janitor already made the choice to do it, and was unconsciously placing himself in a police lineup because he felt like he was also killing his other personalities, which would be murder.)
4. The waving man outside the girlfriend’s window was Jake. Maybe he became so obsessed with her that he stood outside her window, and then narrated that experience from her point of view in his subconsciousness? This idea is made more plausible because at the window of the school, the janitor does the exact same thing (stands at a window, stares, waves, then leaves) and we know the janitor is Jake. So the probability that Jake was stalking the girlfriend goes up significantly.
5. Rashes. It is mentioned in one of the italicized interviews that the body was found in the closet with rashes on his arms and neck, and from then on there were 2 (another instance of twos!) instances of rashes (that I could find). The first was the 3rd server in the Dairy Queen, the one that told the girlfriend that she was worried, who had rashes on her arm. The 2nd was as a metaphor for fear (“Untreated, it will only fester. Fear is a rash” pg 186). So, then, is the 3rd Dairy Queen waitress an embodiment of the fear that Jake feels? It seems like it, given that she was 'worried’, and seemed timid and uneasy, and had a rash, which symbolizes fear.
