In her essay "Tell Me How It Ends," Valeria Luiselli narrates her experience working as an interpreter in an immigration court in New York, where she helps unaccompanied child migrants navigate a forty-question intake form that will determine their legal fate. She plays the role of a compassionate intermediary, translating the children's stories which are "shuffled, stuttered, and shattered beyond the repair of a narrative order … [with] no beginning, no middle, and no end" to "written words, succinct sentences, and barren terms." The essay seems to follow the traditional testimonial structure where the writer tries to expose the unfairness and cruelty of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and advocate for the voiceless.
Yet, Luiselli begins to unsettle this testimonial structure with her handling of the children's stories. Most are left unfinished, cut off in fragments, or answered with a simple "I don't know how it ends." She spends pages carefully recounting the story of the two Guatemalan sisters – their mother's journey to Long Island, their grandmother sewing phone numbers into their dress collars, and their family reunification at JFK airport. Through the extensive use of vivid details and particularity, Luiselli leads us to believe that there will be some sort of resolution or closure to the story. Yet, midway through the story, Luiselli abruptly stops: "I do not know if the two girls will be given relief." Why would Luiselli invest such narrative labor only to withhold the ending it seems designed to reach? What purpose does creating and then frustrating narrative expectations serve in an essay ostensibly advocating for these children?
The Economy of Words
To see how Luiselli builds our appetite for closure, we need to look at how her storytelling style transforms as the essay progresses. She begins her essay in a pared-down, almost stenographic style. In the courtroom, she tries to "look for general categories that may tip the legal scale in favor" and records answers like "I worked in the fields, ten or maybe fifteen hours a day. / The MS-13 shot my sister. She died. / Yes, my uncle hit me often. / No, my grandmother never hit us." These stories are stripped of connectivity. They read off like items in a ledger rather than a cohesive story. They show the implementation of an economy of words and use a matter-of-fact tone with phrases like "[s]he died" showing the use of the "barren terms" referred to earlier. There is no space for color, atmosphere, or subjectivity. The effect is that we hear voices reduced to evidence and lives flattened to satisfy the checkboxes demanded by the intake form.
This flat style makes the sudden eruption of detail as seen in the stories of the Guatemalan sisters and of Manu all the more striking. She describes the five-year-old "undress[ing] a crayon and scratch[ing] its trunk with her fingernail" and Manu's honest comment that he would have coffee and snacks "if it's free." These details resist the economy of words earlier imposed, animating the children as full, irreducible individuals. This choice seems to oppose a system built to reward children who can package themselves for consumption by the legal system. Yet, even these fuller depictions refuse closure, denying the reader the comfort of a finished story.
This frustration becomes especially apparent as Luiselli's daughter repeatedly asks "Tell me how it ends, Mamma." Just as the girl wants an ending to satisfy her curiosity, many readers are also conditioned to look for narrative payoff after so much detail. But Luiselli's answer – "I don't know how it ends" – refuses both requests.
Cultivating and Denying Closure
The essay's structure itself resembles this cultivation and denial through Luiselli's framing of her family's road trip alongside the children's stories. She builds anticipation through her children's repeated question "When will we get there? How many more hours?", creating a parallel between her family's journey toward a destination and our expectation of narrative resolution. This structural parallel becomes even clearer when Luiselli describes the news coverage: "Questions, speculations, and opinions flash-flood the news for the days that follow. What will happen to these children? Where are the parents? Where will they go next?" She presents herself and her readers as equally hungry for answers, equally positioned as consumers of the stories. She presents stark data – "eighty percent of the women and girls who cross Mexico to get to the US border are raped on the way" – which creates an expectation that individual stories will illuminate these statistics. Yet when she encounters actual children, she systematically refuses to satisfy this connection. The essay mentions "the bodies of seventy-two Central American migrants were found piled up inside a ranch in Tamaulipas" and asks "What did number seventy-two think when the seventy-first gunshot was heard?" This creates an anticipation that she would expand on individual experience within mass tragedy. But instead of providing that individual perspective, she shifts to think about abstract questions about accountability, again leaving readers with the uneasy void of incompleteness.
Manu's Case: Open-Endedness as Preservation
Luiselli's treatment of Manu's case shows how open-endedness preserves human complexity against bureaucratic reduction. When we first meet Manu, his story seems to follow a clear trajectory toward legal resolution: he has documentation ("a folded piece of paper from his pocket. It's a copy of a police report he filed against gang members"), clear persecution narrative ("They kicked the door open and shot my brother"), and legal representation. Yet six months later, when Manu reveals "MS-13 in Hempstead wants him" and describes how "Barrio 18... beat his teeth out of his mouth," his story refuses fitting into simple boxes. The very system meant to protect him has placed him back in danger. Luiselli's refusal to resolve Manu's situation keeps his story alive. It allows the children to be more than what they have suffered.
The Extractive Logic of Reading
We begin to realize that through the essay's fragmented structure, the deliberate juxtapositions of the family's road trip with the children's stories, and the strategic refusal to provide closure suggests that Luiselli is doing more than exposing institutional cruelty. She presents the questionnaire not merely as a flawed tool but also as a predatory instrument of extraction that mines the children's life experiences. This process turns their identity into that of a transactional narrator, hollowing out their personality and replacing it with a strategic narrative of suffering. The child's own truth becomes secondary to its legal utility. Crucially, Luiselli frames the essay to expose the reader's own tendency to use such extractive logic when encountering the stories. We are conditioned to listen for "correct answers" that deliver narrative and emotional impact. Through this, Luiselli makes the act of reading itself unsettling and complicit.
Creating a Counter-Archive
Her response, and the essay's ultimate purpose, is to create a counter-archive: a space for the human stories the system deems worthless. By interspersing her exposé of the immigration system with apparently irrelevant details like her own family's road trip, the image of the "happy" deported children playing with balloons, and the view from a courtroom window, she tries to rehumanize the stories. This is why her refusal to end the stories and the title's glaring ask for such an ending is her most powerful strategy. Denying us the catharsis of closure is a form of protection for her subjects. It prevents their stories from being consumed and filed away. The essay champions the messy and inconclusive truth of experience against a machinery that seeks to compress it into a simple, useful, but ultimately false story.
Redefining Victimhood
Luiselli's essay tries to redefine how we understand victimhood by refusing to let trauma become the sum total of identity. Her description of the intake process reveals how the system reduces children to their "battle wounds": "So in the warped world of immigration... a correct answer is when a girl reveals that her father is an alcoholic who physically or sexually abused her." Against this logic, Luiselli insists on presenting children as complex individuals whose identities extend beyond their suffering. This approach challenges readers' expectations about how victims should behave and what stories deserve our attention. The essay suggests that true ethical reading requires remaining present with unresolved suffering rather than seeking the emotional satisfaction of concluded narratives. By denying catharsis, Luiselli tries to prevent the complacency that allows systemic violence to continue unchallenged, forcing readers to remain engaged with ongoing crises rather than filing these stories away as completed moral education.
Work Cited
Luiselli, Valeria. "Tell Me How It Ends (An Essay in Forty Questions)." Freeman's: Family, 2016, pp. 141-183.