AFTER POURING HIMSELF a glass of wine, Lessing's Emilia Galotti open on his desk, Werther shoots himself above the right temple. But the most famous suicide in German literature is not nearly as successful as the book's scandalous reputation might suggest. The gunshot was not fatal; Werther continues to live for an entire night, breathing, quivering, crawling on the floor. Only with the doctor's help does he finally pass away the following day—all of which is reported by an editor who narrates Werther's final hours.

The circumstances of Werther's suicide and their relation to Emilia's death have been studied extensively since the novel's first appearance in 1774. Goethe himself shared that he had received a detailed account of the suicide of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem who had killed himself in 1772, also with an open copy of Emilia Galotti in his room. Since then, critics have reconstructed the history of the novel's development, commenting on the contemporaneous discourse on suicide, Werther's psychology, the intertextual constellation between Lessing and Goethe, and more formal aspects, such as the narrative framing that necessitates the presence of an editor to report Werther's death. The following reading of the novel's peculiar ending takes a different approach. I will argue that the ending of the novel is inextricably tied to various kinds of conclusions that dominate the entire length of its plot—acts of conclusions performed by Werther throughout the text. Werther's mode of reasoning, I argue, is crucial for understanding the nexus between the novel's ending and Goethe's own critical reflection on forms of reasoning. In the second part of this essay, references to Lessing and Herder will provide further evidence that Goethe's text not only reflects on the novel's form but also on modes of reasoning. Lessing's Emilia is indeed an important reference in this context, not so much due to thematic analogies but because it is another text that reflects on its own genre in relation to forms of reasoning. But whereas in Lessing's case this critical discourse on concluding can be associated with the emergence of a new kind of rationality, such hopeful prospects are forestalled for young Werther.