Ending of The Silence of the Girls Explained

What Happens at the End

By the novel’s final chapters, Achilles is dead. Patroclus is dead. The war is grinding towards its conclusion. Briseis, who has been passed between Achilles and Agamemnon and back again, is now in a kind of limbo. Her owner is gone, but she is not free. She is still a captive in a camp full of men who see her as property.

The novel ends with Briseis looking towards an uncertain future. Troy is about to fall. The women know what this means: more killing, more enslavement, more silence. Briseis will be taken by a new Greek master. Her situation has not improved. It has simply changed shape. The ending offers no rescue, no liberation, and no cathartic moment of justice.

What it does offer is Briseis’s voice. She is still speaking, still observing, still refusing to accept the version of events that the Greek heroes tell about themselves. The novel ends not with resolution but with endurance.

Why the Ending Matters

The ending confirms the novel’s general vision and viewpoint. If you were hoping for a moment where Briseis escapes or the women overthrow their captors, you will not find it. Barker is too honest for that. The cultural context of the novel, a warrior society in which women are property, does not allow for a liberating ending. To give Briseis freedom would be to lie about the world the novel has depicted.

Instead, the ending does something more subtle. It shows that survival itself is an achievement. Briseis has outlasted Achilles. She has kept her mind intact. She has told her story. In a novel about silence, the fact that she is still speaking at the end is the closest thing to victory the book allows.

How the Ending Resolves the Conflicts

The war is resolved. Troy falls. The Greeks win. The military conflict that has driven the plot reaches its conclusion. But Barker makes this resolution feel empty rather than triumphant. The victory has cost thousands of lives on both sides, and the “prize” is a ruined city full of dead and enslaved people. The resolution of the war only deepens the novel’s pessimism.

Achilles’s story is resolved. He dies, fulfilling the prophecy that he would achieve glory but not a long life. In the Iliad, his death is treated as tragic and heroic. In Barker’s novel, it is presented more flatly. He is gone, and the women he enslaved must now deal with whoever comes next. His death does not liberate them. It simply removes one source of danger and replaces it with another.

Briseis’s conflict is not resolved. She is still a captive. She still has no legal rights, no autonomy, and no guarantee of safety. The central conflict of the novel, a woman trying to survive and maintain her identity in a system designed to erase her, continues beyond the final page. Barker deliberately refuses to provide closure. The lack of resolution is the point.

The Symbolic Meaning

The burning city. Troy in flames is the novel’s final major image. It represents the complete destruction of the Trojan women’s world: their homes, their families, their identities. Everything Briseis knew before the war is now ash. The image also functions as a comment on the cost of the Greek “victory.” What have they actually won? A pile of rubble and a group of traumatised slaves.

Briseis as narrator. The fact that Briseis is still telling the story at the end is itself symbolic. In the world of the novel, her voice would not have been recorded. The men who write the histories and the poems will not include her perspective. But the novel insists on it anyway. Barker gives Briseis the last word, which is an act of defiance against three thousand years of literary tradition.

The cycle continuing. The ending suggests that what happened to Briseis will happen again, to other women, in other wars. The novel does not present the Trojan War as a unique tragedy. It presents it as a pattern. This cyclical quality is central to the general vision: the suffering of women in war is not historical. It is ongoing.

Writing About the Ending in the Exam

When writing about this ending, focus on what it refuses to do. It refuses to rescue Briseis. It refuses to punish the men who enslaved her. It refuses to offer hope that the system will change. These refusals are deliberate choices by Barker, and they strengthen the novel’s argument. A strong exam sentence: “The ending of The Silence of the Girls denies the reader the comfort of resolution, insisting instead that the reader sit with the reality of what war does to the powerless.”

Compare the ending with your other two texts. Does each text end with resolution or ambiguity? Does each ending confirm or complicate the general vision? In Barker’s novel, the ending confirms and deepens the pessimism that has been present throughout. If your other texts end differently, whether with hope, closure, or transformation, that contrast gives you a strong comparative paragraph.

Related Pages

• The Silence of the Girls Study Guide
• The Silence of the Girls Summary
• Themes in The Silence of the Girls
• Key Moments in The Silence of the Girls
• Key Quotes in The Silence of the Girls