In Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, the ending is rather ambiguous. In class, we discussed a couple of different ideas, but eventually just agreed that it was intentionally left ambiguous; everyone could get something different from it. In this post, I’m going to share what I got from the ending of this book.

My own personal theory is that if the main character had joined his shadow in escaping the End of the World, he would have woken up in the real world and not been trapped in his own consciousness. The professor did not mention this possibility, because he only works in the realm of science. The thought that the main character could choose to leave the End of the World would not have occurred to him as a scientific possibility, because the human mind cannot be predicted scientifically. If the main character had made the decision to jump into the pool, he would have basically chosen to break free of the world his mind had created. However, I think we are supposed to realize that this actually isn’t possible, simply because the main character doesn’t have the willpower to leave the world that he created. As the shadow says, it is his own world, of course he thinks he cannot leave it.