10 Conclusion Ideas for Free: Narrative Essays NOT Like All the Others

For some students, the hardest part about writing a narrative essay is the conclusion. It’s easy to summarize the plot or restate the main points of the content, but this isn’t unique enough to impress your instructor. By seeking free narrative essays online, you can find a sample that will help you develop stronger ideas of your own. In the meantime, refer to these free ideas for inspiration:

10 Unique Conclusion Ideas for a Narrative Essay

1. Share a moral with the reader, so they feel as though they’ve learned something from reading your essay. The stronger the emotional impact, the more likely they will be to remember your paper.
2. End your narrative essay with a surprising piece of information that you’ve been withholding from the reader. Ideally, it should still be relevant to the main content. There’s no point in sharing surprising information if it doesn’t relate to the essay in a more general way.
3. Similar to ending on a surprise, end by writing about a dramatic event. Too many students assume the conclusion of a narrative must be where the plot resolves itself, but there are instances when it may be smarter to introduce a new development to the story right at the end.
4. If your professor approves, you could end your paper with an extended quotation that relates to the content of the essay.
5. Make your reader laugh. As much as students dread writing a conclusion for a narrative essay, professors dread reading them because they tend to be dull. If you can evoke a positive emotional reaction, or even cause your reader to laugh out loud, you’ll make a better impression.
6. Sometimes it feels as though a narrative essay has no moral. If this is genuinely the case, use the conclusion to reflect on this sense that the events of the plot didn’t teach anyone anything.
7. Is there a scene, description, or piece of dialogue in your narrative essay that recurs throughout the paper? You could revisit that portion in your conclusion, showing the reader how much the people involved have changed over the course of the narrative. A line of dialogue that may have meant one thing at the beginning of the story could mean something entirely different by the end.
8. Ask your professor if they’d be willing to accept a narrative essay in which you use the conclusion to discuss your writing process, and why you chose to tell the story you did. This will give you an opportunity to insert your own personal voice into the paper in a way that’s far more clear and direct than it may have been in other sections of the essay.
9. Although, you should try to resolve the plot of your narrative essay, you can also admit the fact that many stories never fully end. Use the conclusion to explore ideas about where these characters may find themselves in the future.
10. Generally, people expect a writer to share their own thoughts and reflections in the conclusion section of a narrative essay. That said, you might instead find it useful to ask the reader what their reactions are to the story. Granted, they won’t be able to answer you directly, but it will surprise them, and it will make them think in greater detail about what they’ve just read.

To earn high grades in college, it often helps to surprise your professors. They’ve spent years reading boring essays. Give them something they do not expect, and they’ll reward your originality.