The pen lingers in my trembling fingers! Is there anything I have left unsaid?(423)

The endings of Caleb Williams leave the reader seemingly without a way to understand what happens at the end of the book. The existence of two endings, one originally published with the novel and the other being "The Original Manuscript Ending of the Novel" would be less confusing if the conclusions did not depict the effects of Caleb's struggles with Falkland (and society) so differently. In the first ending, Caleb declares,

I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate: but I will finish them that thy story may be fully understood; and that, if those errors of thy life be known which thou so ardently desiredst to conceal, the world may at least not hear and repeat a half-told tale. (434)

The original manuscript ending, however, is far more pessimistic:

Well then,--It is wisest to be quiet, it seems--Some people are ambitious--other people talk of sensibility--but it is all folly!--I am sure I am not one of those--was I ever?--True happiness lies in being like a stone--Nobody can complain of me--all day long I do nothing am a stone--a gravestone!--an obelisk to tell you, here lies what was once a man! (443)

In this version of the ending, Caleb is mentally destroyed by the disclosure of "the minuteness of some parts of the story" which elucidates the crimes committed by Falkland. In this original ending, Caleb "stood there for justice" and it is exactly this stance of justice superseding individual honor which ruins Caleb. In a twist that adds another layer of uncertainty, two pages of the original ending are missing, and the story somehow cuts from Caleb's courtroom confrontation with Falkland to his captivity in an "apartment" with Gines.

In his essay "Reading Beginnings and Endings," Peter Rabinowitz writes:

Thematizing a text's conclusion is more complex still when a convention is undermined not by overthrowing it, but rather by following it in such as ostentatious way that it looks absurd - where the cadence is not deceptive, but excessive. (308)

This seems to be what takes place in Caleb Williams, as in both endings Caleb seems to excessively punish himself for actions that seem logical to the reader throughout the story. His punitive self-regard in both endings seems to contradict what actually takes place in the story. This destabilization makes interpretation difficult, because it is difficult to understand the source (especially in the original manuscript ending) of Caleb's mental struggles. It is this type of ambiguity that makes Gothic stories an interpretive anomaly.