Death by misadventure

“Death by misadventure” is the strange man’s provisional description of a woman’s death in the novel’s extended ending. The phrase offers the sound of an explanation without establishing one: he says he is inclined to believe it was accidental, then proposes another look at the window. Whether the ending closes the scene or leaves its central uncertainty open depends partly on which published text a reader encounters.

Meaning and Wording

The expression appears in the sentence, “Death by misadventure, I’m inclined to believe.” Its compact, official-sounding label is immediately qualified by the speaker’s uncertainty. He does not announce a settled cause; “I’m inclined to believe” marks the statement as provisional. The phrase therefore names a possible account of the death, not a fact the scene definitively verifies.

The following sentence keeps that qualification active: “Let’s go up and have another look at that window.” The suggestion of a further inspection implies that the visible circumstances have not answered every question. The wording sets a verdict beside an invitation to investigate again: an apparently conclusive label is followed by an action that could reopen the inquiry. The result is not a demonstrated explanation but a tension between naming and not knowing.

“Misadventure” also directs attention toward accident rather than an explicitly established intention. Yet the speaker’s hesitation prevents that word from settling what happened. Read alongside the preceding passage, in which the woman insists that the fall occurred before anyone could stop it, then collapses and loses consciousness, the phrase meets a scene already organized around incomplete knowledge. The strange man’s comment adds a possible interpretation after the darkness; it does not turn the woman’s account into independently confirmed fact.

Place in the Ending

The phrase occurs after the woman’s knees give way, she sinks down, and strong arms lift her. The narration then says that everything was dark. In the extended version, “Centuries after” introduces the strange man’s words, setting his proposed explanation beyond that immediate moment. The abrupt temporal leap gives the remark an unusual position: it follows the collapse and darkness, but does not supply a straightforward continuation of the scene in ordinary chronological time.

That placement makes the phrase more than a label for the death. It changes the reader’s relation to the ending. The darkness can stand as a terminal stopping point, while the added words reopen the event through a later observer who remains uncertain and wants to examine the window. The text provides no account in this passage of what another inspection would establish. Its final movement is therefore toward renewed scrutiny, not a narrated resolution.

Publication History

The phrase belongs to an ending that was not retained in every edition. The novel’s first and second printings, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1929, concluded with the paragraph containing the strange man’s words. The third printing omitted that paragraph and ended instead with “Then everything was dark.” The difference is consequential even though it consists of a brief closing passage: one version ends at the woman’s loss of consciousness, while the other attaches a tentative comment and a request to revisit the window.

Later publication history continued the split. The Arno Press and Negro Universities Press editions of 1969, the Ayer Publishing Company edition of 1985, and the Rutgers University Press edition of 1986 use the abridged ending. The 1971 Collier Books edition from Macmillan and the 1997 Penguin Books edition retain the extended passage, as does the Modern Library edition. A reader’s encounter with the phrase thus depends on the edition, and the two endings should not be treated as identical textual conclusions.

Interpretive Consequences

The abridged ending leaves the final darkness without a subsequent verbal framing. The extended ending gives that darkness a disputed afterlife: a stranger offers an accidental-death interpretation but immediately signals that he would look again. The added passage neither proves that the death was accidental nor replaces the scene with a definitive account. Instead, it makes the reader weigh a tentative explanation against the unresolved circumstances that prompt further inspection.

The editorial note records Deborah McDowell’s view that the closing paragraph does not alter the spirit of the original. It also argues that the addition makes the novel more clearly “writerly,” using Roland Barthes’s term for a text whose meaning readers help produce. The phrase is central to that distinction. By withholding certainty while supplying a possible verdict, it invites interpretation without fixing one; by disappearing from the abridged version, it also shows how a small textual variation can alter the reader’s final task. In the extended ending, the question is not simply what happened, but how much authority to grant a stranger’s qualified conclusion when the text itself ends by asking for another look.