Examples of Ambiguity in Literature: 6 Short Stories That Refuse to Decide
Quick answer: Ambiguity examples from Stockton, Hawthorne, Joyce, James, Gilman and Wilde: stories that leave a central question open on purpose, and how they keep the reader arguing.
Ambiguity in fiction is a deliberate openness about something the reader wants settled: what happened, what it meant, whether the narrator can be believed. It is not vagueness. A vague story has not decided; an ambiguous one has decided to hold two possibilities in balance and give each enough evidence to survive. The reader finishes the story still arguing, and that argument is the story's afterlife.
Six stories that refuse to decide
The Lady, or the Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton sets a young man before two doors in an arena, one hiding a bride and one a tiger, with the princess who loves him signalling which to open. She knows what is behind each. Stockton lays out her jealousy and her love with equal weight, then ends by asking the reader which door opened. The question has been argued for over a century.
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne follows Brown into a forest where he sees his whole town, his minister and his wife at a witches' meeting, then wakes against a rock alone. Hawthorne asks outright whether Brown only dreamed it, declines to answer, and shows that it does not matter: Brown lives the rest of his life as if it were true.
Eveline by James Joyce brings a young woman to the quay with her lover and the boat to Buenos Aires, and leaves her gripping the iron railing, unable to move, her face giving him no sign. The story does not say why she stays, or whether staying is failure or fidelity. Joyce gives fear and duty and love equal room and closes the door.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James is narrated by a governess who sees ghosts that no one else admits to seeing. Every sighting can be read as a real haunting or as her own disturbance, and James builds the sentences so that both readings hold at every point. The final scene settles the child's fate and nothing else.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman ends with the narrator crawling round the room and asking her fainting husband why he has fainted, having got out at last in spite of him and Jane. Readers still debate who Jane is, whether the narrator has escaped or collapsed, and whether the woman in the paper was ever anyone but herself.
The Sphinx Without a Secret by Oscar Wilde has Lord Murchison tell of a woman who rented rooms she visited only to sit alone, and who died before he could learn why. He asks the narrator what it meant. The narrator suggests she simply liked mystery; Murchison is unconvinced. Wilde ends on the doubt.
How to use it in your own story
Ambiguity is a construction, not an omission. Both readings must be supported by specific evidence the reader can point to.
Common mistakes
The commonest is ambiguity used as an excuse for an unfinished ending, where the writer has not decided what happened and calls the indecision open. A second is the lopsided balance, where one reading has all the evidence and the other is a technicality. A third is opening too many questions, so the reader feels teased rather than trusted.
Where readers meet it today
Readers today meet productive ambiguity in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, Ernest Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants, Jorge Luis Borges's The Garden of Forking Paths, Ryunosuke Akutagawa's In a Grove and Kazuo Ishiguro's A Village After Dark.
What writers can take from this
- One open question per story; make everything else definite.
- Equal evidence for both answers, counted on reread.
- End on a hard image, not a soft one.
- Let a character guess wrong so the reader keeps thinking.
- If you do not know what happened, that is not ambiguity yet.
Try it yourself
Write a 600-word story in which a character finds a letter addressed to them in handwriting they recognise but cannot place. The story must end with the letter read, and the reader must be able to argue for two different senders from the evidence given.
Questions
What is an example of ambiguity in a short story?
Frank Stockton's The Lady, or the Tiger?, which ends by asking the reader which door the princess signalled. Her jealousy and her love are given equal weight and the story never resolves them.
How do you identify deliberate ambiguity?
Check whether the story supplies evidence for two readings of a central question and closes without choosing. If both readings can be argued from specific details, the ambiguity is built; if only one can, the story is simply unclear.
Is an open ending the same as ambiguity?
An open ending leaves the future unresolved; ambiguity leaves the meaning or the facts unresolved. Eveline has both: we do not know what she will do next or why she could not move.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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