No Happy Ending???

The discussion we had in class last week about the article written by Kurt Vonnegut really interested me. I felt that the graphs he made really matched up with how story endings really are in different cultures. I was able to relate to this because in the past, I have seen both sides of the spectrum and was able to compare them. When I was younger, my class did a unit where we read a lot of different Cinderella stories, each one a different version from a different country. Obviously all of them had the same general idea, but they weren't all completely the same. Most of them had happy endings when Cinderella ended up with the prince, but I remember the Native American version had the biggest impact on my by far because it was so different than what I was expecting. It was a story called The Turkey Girl, and it was the story of Cinderella adapted from the Zuni tribe. In this version, the main character, the turkey girl, gets help from some turkeys so that she can attend the festival. However, she ends up forgetting the time and loses out in the end. I distinctly remember the feeling of shock I had when I read the last page. I just kind of sat there staring at the last page for a couple minutes, dumbfounded at the fact that a Cinderella story could possibly end that way. I remember that it upset me a little bit, because I was so used to the main character winning in the end. Looking back on this, I think it's a really good example of how modern culture, US culture in particular, has ingrained a kind of expectation for a "happy" ending. Just like in the excerpt we read from Kurt Vonnegut, all the examples of American stories had the graph drawn up at the end, showing that there main character ended with good fortune. However, in the Kafka story, the graph ends going down, into the "ill fortune" area. I find it very interesting that we grow up believing that every story's ending will be a happy end, and even into adulthood we rarely encounter a movie or novel that has a unhappy ending. Have you encountered a story of any kind that ends in ill fortune for the main characters? What was your reaction to it? Were you surprised? In general, do you think this expectation our culture has created for a positive ending to every story is a positive or negative thing?