The Ending of Amnesty

    At the end of Amnesty, it is revealed that Danny does end up confessing the information he knows on Prakash and the book ends with Danny in the process of being sent back to Sri Lanka. The ending was very short and somewhat unexpected, and I’m not sure what to make of it. The whole book deals with Danny’s thoughts and struggles of being illegal in Australia, and the uneventful ending leaves a feeling of incompleteness.

            I think the ending was interesting because, throughout the whole book, it appeared as if Danny was really going to let Prakash get away with the murder. Through most of the book, the time stamps help to countdown how much time is left before Prakash supposedly flies off to South Africa, and Danny becomes “free.” It is once he realizes that Prakash never meant to fly away, and that he meant to kill Radha’s husband, Mark, as well, that he finally takes action and reports what he knows to the police. In other words, was it the fact that Prakash was planning on killing Mark as well and staying in Australia knowing his (Danny’s) secret that finally prompted Danny to accept that his life in Australia was over?

            One reason why I think that the ending was so sudden was probably that that was the realistic way to show it. It’s hard for the audience to comprehend the disappearance of Danny’s presence on the last page because we have been inside his head the whole book. Even though the audience knows that Danny is a good person struggling to come to terms with the truth and justice, the police frankly don’t care about all of that. In reality, no matter how “good” they are, undocumented immigrants on a daily basis, face the same end that Danny had, abrupt, and the audience is left with no idea as to what will happen next to him/them. It’s as if Danny were suddenly erased from the slate. What happens next? This is a hard reality that undocumented immigrants overall, go through. The audience is left ignorant of what happens to Danny and those connected to him, like his girlfriend and maybe all the others who knew he was illegal.

    At the beginning of the book, I thought that there were three options as to how the book would end. Either he keeps quiet and stays in Australia, he reveals what he knows and is deported, or he reveals what he knows, and by some miracle, he is able to stay in Australia. After all, why not, everything always turns out well for good people right? Unfortunately, we know that this is far from the truth, and I think this is what the book wanted to show. 

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