What Happened to the Mouse?/Literature

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of What Happened to the Mouse? in Literature include:

  • In the Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae, or "Lives of the Saints of Britain", which predates the 9th century, warfare breaks out when a lovely maiden is kidnapped by King Maelgwn's soldiers. St. Cadog approaches the king and convinces him to repent and recall his army - but never asks for the maiden back, despite her father being an official in Cadog's church. She is never mentioned again.
  • In Robert Bloch's The Yougoslaves (sic), a gang of murderous, Brainwashed and Crazy boys is shown raping a little girl. The boys are eventually killed. No mention is made of what happens to the girl.
  • In Stephen King's The Green Mile, there's a literal "What Happened to the Mouse?" when Mr. Jingles runs away after Eduard Delacroix is executed. Stephen King wrote in the afterward that even he forgot about Mr. Jingles until his wife asked him the question, so he wrote in a resolution.
  • Also from Stephen King, The Langoliers ends with the survivors abruptly and happily arriving back at the airport. Um, that's great, but just how the hell are they going to explain how a plane appeared out of nowhere, with the corpse of a little girl on board?
  • Again from Stephen King, in his short story "The Jaunt", the protagonist's daughter almost literally asks this question when the protagonist tells the family the story of the eponymous teleportation device's invention. To wit, the inventor ran down to the pet store and tested some white mice out on the machine. Slightly subverted when he euphemistically explains that they "didn't feel so good the first time" after being sent through awake. And by now you've probably guessed why he was being euphemistic with his family about what happened to those mice.
  • At the end of Frankenstein, said doctor's brother Ernest is the only member of the family completely unaccounted for by Shelley (the others are all dead).
    • Especially Egregious because the doctor whines and mopes at length about how everyone he loves is dead.
  • 19th century fiction is full to the gills with "What Happened to the Mouse?" scenes, partly because many books of the time were originally written for serialization in magazines. When the writer's on Chapter 24 he might forget or misremember what he wrote in Chapter 1, published two years previously. Dickens was infamous for this.
  • In Anthony Trollope's Barchester Towers, it's stated repeatedly in the first nine chapters that the new bishop will spend most of the year with his wife in London, leaving the actual running of the diocese to his assistant Mr. Slope. But the bishop and his wife never actually leave. (The reason is that Trollope put the book aside for a year, and when he returned changed his mind about what would happen without bothering to rewrite the first nine chapters.)
  • In the original British printing of Good Omens, it is never revealed what happened to Warlock the false antichrist after he is taken to the fields of Meggido by the forces of hell and revealed as a sham. For the American edition the authors added about 700 extra words revealing that he is alive and well, understandably perplexed by his experiences, and heading back to America thanks to some reality-manipulation by Adam.
  • In the Sword of Truth series, Richard's two hulking bodyguards Ulic and Egan disappear from the narrative entirely after Temple of the Winds, and no reference is made to where they are, or what they're doing. Their sudden and conspicuous return to the plot in Confessor seems to suggest Goodkind actually forgot about them entirely.
    • There's also Jebra, the seer who first appears in Stone Of Tears. In the final trilogy, she's brought to the heroes by Shota to tell them about her experiences being caught in city conquered by the Imperial Order.[1] Shota leaves her there, but in the next book she's mentioned as having wandered off, and there's almost no effort made to find her, and she's never referenced again.
    • This happens with a lot of minor characters/villains/etc. throughout the series. Goodkind tends to bring in stuff strictly to serve as a plot device or MacGuffin, and then forget about it after it's served its purpose, or dismiss it with only a cursory mention.
  • Several Warcraft Expanded Universe novels mention princess Calia Menethil, the older sister of Big Bad prince (and now Lich King) Arthas Menethil. Calia's fate has never been revealed; in each book, she simply drops out of sight and is never mentioned again. She is the subject of several Epileptic Trees in fan circles.
  • Averted in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, which always pauses the narrative to explain what happens to characters that drop out of the plot. Because the main character is a Doom Magnet, everyone he associates with dies soon after they part company.
  • Happens quite a bit A Series of Unfortunate Events. The Quagmires, Friday, and the rest of the island inhabitants in The End, Mr. Poe, and many, many more. Curse you, Lemony Snicket, you psycho author you. Knowing the author, this was probably completely intentional.
  • In the first Sherlock Holmes story "A Study in Scarlet", Watson mentions that he "keeps a bull pup" before moving in with Holmes. Once he moves in, the bull pup is never mentioned again. Maybe it died between two adventures? Though there is an explanation that's seen print is that "to keep a bull pup" is slang for "to have a short temper."
  • In Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn Trilogy, a fairly major character in Book 1, Kelven Solanki, vanishes without a trace at the end of the book after being promoted and assigned as a liaison and advisor to Admiral Meredith Saldana on his flagship. Despite Saldana and his taskforce playing major roles in Books 2 and 3, Solanki is nowhere to be seen. The author later admitted in a Q&A on his website that he had simply completely forgotten about him, but his overall importance to the story had been fulfilled. Given that the ending was so comprehensive that even the fate of a minor car thief who appeared for one paragraph is wrapped up, Solanki's abrupt disappearance seems a bit unfair to the character.
  • Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series is also noteworthy: a full list of characters who appeared briefly and then vanished would be quite long, but chief among them is Tattersail and her reincarnated form, Silverfox, who vanished along with several thousand kickass undead warriors in Book 3. Apparently their story will eventually be told by Erikson's co-writer, Ian Esslemont, several years down the road. Maybe.
  • One of the many things wrong with The Legend of Rah and the Muggles by Nancy Stouffer is the sheer number of mouse plots in the story. The mother of the twin protagonists, having been recently widowed at the start of the story, enters a very heavy flirtation with the palace butler before shipping her kids off to save them from impending doom; what becomes of the mom and the butler, we never know. Later, the twins are deeply involved in the search for a specific treasure chest; when it's found, the bad twin insists on claiming it, to which the good twin consents. Not only is it never mentioned again, but the reader never even finds out what was in the chest that was so important.
  • Romance of the Three Kingdoms raises numerous mouse questions, as might be expected of a semi-historical narrative with Loads and Loads of Characters. To quote the book's 17th-century editor, "A beloved commander, a beloved son, lost for the sake of a woman... but what happened to lady Zou?""
  • In Raymond Chandler's first Philip Marlowe novel The Big Sleep, all of the various murders and crimes are explained, except that of the Sternwoods' chauffeur, Owen Taylor. During filming of the 1946 film adaptation, director Howard Hawks and screenwriters William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman sent a cable to Chandler, who later told a friend in a letter: "They sent me a wire... asking me, and dammit I didn't know either."
  • Reiko from James Michener's Hawaii simply disappears toward the end. She's a secondary character with an interesting plotline, but after her husband dies she's never heard from again, leaving the reader to wonder whether she ever accomplished her thwarted dreams.
  • Tom Robbins' Still Life With Woodpecker hangs a lampshade on this, when Leigh-Cheri's reaction to the story of the Princess and the Toad is "Whatever happened to the Golden Ball?" (that the princess was chasing when she first found the Toad.)
  • In Musashi, a novel based on the life of Miyamoto Musashi, the title character learns that his sister has been arrested as a ploy to lure him out of hiding. He's about to play right into the officers' hands when he's stopped by the kindly priest Takuan, who then imprisons Musashi himself for three years so he can study the classics and become a more thoughtful person. The story promptly forgets all about his sister, except for a brief mention at the end that she's moved to another region and is happily married, with no mention of how she got out of jail.
  • Dan Simmons' Ilium/Olympos cycle. What happened to that mice colony? What happened to that humongous tentacled brain? Where did Caliban go? Did moravecs manage to get rid of those 768 black holes? Can the remaining firmaries be turned on or not? Why didn't anyone care for more than seven years? Who the hell was Quiet and did (s)he actually do anything? Has the quantum stability problem been solved? If yes, then how? Aaargh, so many questions...
  • David Weber's Honorverse is usually rife with Continuity Nods that are explained in excruciating detail just in case you're new to the series... but for some reason, the hoopla raised in Honor Among Enemies, in regards to the Peeps landing five bomb-pumped-laser hits on a passenger liner, is never referenced again. Though Weber did indicate several times that the passenger liner was nearly empty.
  • The sheer amount of detail in the Harry Potter books leads to a number of these, too. Harry pulls a cracker and out come, among other things, several live mice. But mice are not throw-aways like the other things in the cracker. Neither Harry nor anyone else is ever mentioned as keeping pet mice. Harry muses that Mrs. Norris got to them.
    • Ludo Bagman is forced to flee from goblins at the end of Goblet of Fire. He is never seen or heard of again.
    • Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic for most of the series. His last official position we hear of is at the start of book 6, where he's been sacked as Minister, but is kept on as liaison between the Ministry and the Muggle Prime Minister. No word at all of him or how he reacted to Voldemort taking over the Ministry in Book 7.
    • It was never explained what was behind the veil that Sirius fell through when dying in book 5, though as it is in the Department of Mysteries, it is likely that no-one knows.
      • Even though in the movie Sirius was dying as he fell, in the book it's obvious that the fall through the arch is what killed him. So, it's fairly clear what lies behind the arch, especially when you take into account what Harry heard from it.
  • In Thomas Harris' Black Sunday, Lander gave his pregnant ex-wife two tickets to the Super Bowl. No mention is made on if she went or what happened to her.
  • In Ender's Shadow, Bean is shown drawing up Ender's army. He decides to add a girl named Wu to his group. He mentions that she was a brilliant tactician, a great shooter, and did well in her studies, but as soon as her commander assigned her to be a toon leader, she filed for transfer and refused to play. No one knew why. In the rest of the book (and in Ender's Game, which takes place at the same time), not only do they never mention her again, they even make it clear that there are no girls in Ender's Army.
  • Early in Tom Clancy's Red Storm Rising, Iceland is conquered by the Soviet Union to allow their submarines and bombers a clean shot at convoys ferrying war material and American reinforcements to Europe, where the ground war is raging. In the course of this operation, the ship carrying the Soviet invasion force is Harpooned and strafed by American fighters, seriously wounding the captain. Much buildup is done about whether or not the captain will survive. As soon as the ship is run ashore (most of the line handlers had been killed, so it couldn't dock) the General of the invading army takes him below to the surgeon, thinking "Maybe there's still enough time." The captain is never mentioned again, leaving the reader to wonder as to his fate.
  • In Reaper Man, Windle is introduced to members of the Fresh Start Club, including someone called "Brother Gorper". All the other members are specifically identified as various types of undead, and most have dialogue or subsequent references, but Gorper (whatever he is) never gets mentioned again.
    • Inverted in the same novel, where Windle recalls receiving a note from Mr. Ixolite the banshee. No such scene is included in the book; presumably, it was supposed to be one of the "three inexplicable phenomena" which Windle ponders on another occasion, because there are only two shown. Instead, it's a Where'd That Mouse Come From? inversion.
  • Pamela Dean's The Secret Country has a "What happened to the relatives" in it: The older cousins, with whom the game was usually played, had emigrated to Australia: the younger cousins were left in Illinois with other relatives while their parents were spending the summer in Australia without them, and thereby hangs the tale. At the end, after the Illinois children show up in Australia via a magic mirror, their parents decide to accompany the children back to the Hidden Land. It's a one-way trip; they know they'll never come back. The parents cook up plausible explanations for their "disappearance", pretending they're going to emigrate to Australia also and then "just lose touch". In the middle of all the preparations, no one suggests that the Illinois relatives might like to know how the kids disappeared from what was supposed to be an afternoon trip to the library, and how they got to Australia.
  • There's a tragic example in Robin McKinley's Deerskin. After being raped by her father Princess Lissla flees, badly wounded and pregnant with his incestuous child. She is later healed by a goddess, apparently losing several years of memory in the process. No further mention is made of her pregnancy until near the end of the book, when she confronts her father again, and reveals that she miscarried after five months and suppressed the memory.
    • It is mentioned. During the period where she's living in the hut and dazed, she experiences a particularly bad night which results in a huge bloodstain on the floor.
  • In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Black Colossus", the princess is in command because her brother the king is being held captive and might be either ransomed or handed over to their enemies. While discussing what to do, the first point brought up is whether to enlarge the offer of ransom; only then do they discuss the attacking army, and that, partly because the captor won't take them seriously while they might be overrun. But they deal with the army, and the captive king is never even addressed again.
  • Many, many things are wrong with the Maradonia Saga books, but this one is particularly obvious. Several apparently important characters—including Maya and Joey's parents and brother, the grasshopper Hoppy, and their dog—show up at the beginning and then are forgotten about for the rest of the novel. Some "forgotten" characters do make brief cameos in the ending, but it's never stated what they were doing in the meantime. Was Hoppy just hanging out in Joey's pocket the whole time or what?
  • In the Tortall Universe, it was because of this trope that author Tamora Pierce eventually wrote a short story about what happened to the tree that became man as a result of the mage Numair turning his Evil Counterpart into a tree in the second book of the Immortals quartet.
  • Early on in the Vorkosigan Saga novel The Vor Game, Miles is assigned to Kyril Island as the new Weather Officer. The officer he is replacing has been there so long that he has developed a "nose" for predicting the weather, especially the deadly wah-wahs, which is far more accurate than the available equipment. Miles is briefly terrified that everyone else will notice a sudden drop in the accuracy of reporting when he takes over, but soon has a major confrontation with the commanding officer and is transferred off the island. Presumably the poor patsy who replaces him will be no better at predicting the weather than Miles, but the island is mentioned just once more in a later novel, a decade later in book time, and it's implied that nothing has changed there.
    • Test readers of the book were so distracted by the potential plot relevence of some money being hidden as a relatively minor plot point that the finished novel uses illicit cookies for the same plot purpose to avert this trope.
  • In Lucifer's Hammer, Doctor Charlie Sharps leads a group of highly intelligent (not to mention prepared and supplied) scientists out from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, headed toward the San Joaquin Valley and shelter. Not only are they never seen or heard from again, they are only mentioned once in passing by another character, and then forgotten.
  • In the first Maximum Ride book, the main characters (who are winged humans, part bird, part human, created by some Mad Scientists) have gone years without seeing another genetic experiment like them. When they get to a secret facility in New York, they find several experiments caged up. Naturally, they set them free. You'd think they'd want to talk to them or interact with them, maybe help them find a safe place, but it never goes anywhere. Over five books later, said experiments don't even get a passing mention, they're never thought of again, so it's a plot thread that went nowhere and contributed nothing to the story.
    • Maximum Ride suffers from this a lot. The second book also has the group finding two kids in the woods. While Angel reads their minds enough to know that they aren't experiments, she can tell that they aren't normal kids. The kids use a tracking device to lead people from Itex to the group, and the most that's found out is that they were kidnapped solely for that purpose, and that they would be left to be eaten by something if they failed. The group leaves them in the woods to be recaptured by the company, and they're never thought of again. The third book has an entire facility full of successful experiments, including clones of Max (introduced in the book prior and herself having fallen into this trope until that point), Nudge, and Angel. It's never revealed what happened to the experiments after the facility is captured, and again the group never thinks anything of it. Meanwhile, Fang starts a worldwide revolution via the children that read his blog. You'd think that something like that would get a mention in the next book, but it might as well have not happened for all the aftermath there was.
  • Peter Pan: In Wendy's personal imaginary world, she owns a wolf pup abandoned by its parents. Naturally, when she gets to Neverland the wolf appears and becomes her constant companion—or so the narration claims, since it never gets mentioned again. Surprisingly, this detail was never referenced or expanded on in any adaptations, even though the Disney version could easily have turned the wolf into a cuddly Woodland Creature and the 2003 live-action version could have thrown it into some fight scenes. (There was at least one set of illustrations (Trina Schart Hyman's) which didn't neglect the wolf and showed it hanging around at Wendy's feet in the "Home Under the Ground" scene.)
  • In book four of the Inheritance Cycle Eragon and Arya wind up captured by a group of evil priests. A young novitiate appears and agrees to help them escape. He fails and winds up unconcious, while the more competent Angela comes to the rescue. Eragon insists that they take their would-be rescuer's comatose body with them as they escape the cathedral, however after this the boy is promptly dropped off in an alley and never mentioned again.
  • Why is a raven like a writing desk? was left unsolved by Lewis Carroll...
    • An odd subversion. While never the answer is never given in either of the books - as Dodgson meant for the riddle to be a riddle without an answer - but enough of his fans pestered him about the riddle that he made up an answer: "Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat, and it is 'nevar' put with the wrong end in front". (Among other suggested answers, Sam Loyd's "Poe wrote on both" is probably the best-known.)
  • In Lauren Myracle's Rhymes with Witches, the main character's best friend's older sister is described in detail in the first few chapter. However, she is rarely mentioned after that.
  • Towards the middle of Reset -- Never Again, the two villains, who are Asian, try to hire a detective to find the whereabouts of the heroes. It turns out, however, that the detective is a member of the Oriental Exclusion League, and says that she is going to tell their leader, one Tveitmoe, about what had happened. Neither Tveitmoe nor the detective are ever mentioned again, and the villains do not appear to be hampered by any bigots after that.
  • Just before the timeskip in the Thoroughbred series by Joanna Campbell, Ashley reveals she's pregnant with her second child and "due in January" (incidentally, the scene plays out almost exactly the same as did the one in which she revealed her first pregnancy). The next book (and the timeskip) comes around, the series now follows Ashley's now teenaged daughter, and...the daughter is an only child. No mention is made of Ashley's second pregnancy.
  • In some of Tolkien's older works such as The Silmarillion, there are several minor characters that are simply never mentioned again with no resolution, although this can be forgiven since he never completed those works in his lifetime.
  • W.E.B Griffin's The Corps series has many viewpoint characters simply vanish from the narrative, especially when the series timeskips into Korea. While a couple are at least given some resolution, many simply vanish between books.
  • In the sixth book of the 39 Clues series, Isabel Kabra mentions that Amy and Dan's parents visited, among other places, Karachi, Pakistan, and also thought Amy and Dan visited there, although they never did. This does not go unnoticed by Amy and Dan, but it is soon forgotten and never brought up again. Though with three books still left in the Sequel Series, and suspicions of Isabel being a member of the antagonistic group of said sequel series, Karachi may still be brought up again.
  • In The Short Second life of Bree Tanner, Freaky Fred runs away before the newborn army is sent to fight the Cullens. He is never mentioned again in the series, even though the novella ends with Bree mentally begging Edward to be kind to Fred if they ever meet.
  1. ↑ surprisingly, she manages to avoid the usual fate of women in such situations
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