Robert Grainier, a laborer in the early twentieth-century American West, lives alone for decades after a forest fire kills his wife Gladys and baby daughter Kate.

Sal Paradise, after years of wild cross-country trips with his friend Dean Moriarty, settles down in New York with a woman he loves.

In the final chapter, Alex, the violent teenager who was “cured” by the Ludovico Technique and then “uncured,” simply outgrows violence.

The narrator, Francis Thurston, pieces together evidence from his late great-uncle’s papers and a sailor’s diary showing that Cthulhu, an ancient, monstrous being sleeping beneath the Pacific, briefly woke when its sunken city of R’lyeh rose.

After years of disasters, wars, shipwrecks and betrayals, Candide is reunited with Cunégonde, who is now old and ugly, and marries her anyway.

The unnamed narrator realizes Tyler Durden, the anarchist who founded Fight Club and Project Mayhem, is his own split personality.

Palmer LaRue, who dreads turning ten because boys his age are expected to become “wringers” who break the necks of wounded pigeons at the town’s annual Pigeon Day shoot, finally stands up to the crowd.

Patrick Bateman, a wealthy Wall Street banker who describes committing many murders, confesses to his lawyer, who mistakes him for someone else and says a man Bateman claims to have killed is alive.

Siblings Judy and Peter finish the jungle board game Jumanji just as a volcano erupts in their living room, and when Judy reaches the golden city and shouts “Jumanji,” the chaos vanishes.

Brothers Danny and Walter Budwing, whose house was launched into outer space by a board game called Zathura, survive meteors, a robot and lizard-like Zorgons.