The Jarring Ending Of American Fiction, Explained

If Jefferson’s main intention with American Fiction’s controversial ending is to spark discourse, it does just that. From start to finish, this story will have you talking (and, more than likely, arguing about it online). Just like Erasure, the 2001 Percival Everett novel that it’s adapted from, American Fiction is just a story about a man at a moral crossroads in his life, told without bias or the desire to make anyone pick a side. To his own admission, however, Jefferson knows that audiences will have…thoughts about Monk’s decision to keep playing the game. Given everything we’ve seen about the character and his very strict, very strong beliefs about what constitutes “real” art, it feels wrong for him to go out sad that way. (Writing an ending where a Black man is murdered by the police isn’t exactly respite from Black trauma porn.) But, one might argue, the messiness of Monk’s own life could have also softened his hard sentiment about the “right” way to talk about the Black experience; after all, his personal drama was something straight out of a Tyler Perry movie, deep, dark family secrets and all. Perhaps being in the thick of his own wreckage — wreckage that outsiders might rush to pathologize and racialize — made Monk realize that Blackness isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t productive to categorize or rank its many realities.