Which critic describes the ending's explosive release as being massively prepared for and giving the ending its own sense of adequacy?

Which critic describes the ending's explosive release as being massively prepared for and giving the ending its own sense of adequacy?

• A. Denis Feeney - Plot
• B. Emma Buckley - Death of Turnus
• C. Denis Feeney - Death of Turnus
• D. Harrison - Battle scenes

Answer: (C)

The ending’s explosive release is best understood as a deliberately earned climax, where the death of Turnus serves as the moment that finally releases all the built‑up tension of the epic. Denis Feeney emphasizes how Virgil threads foreshadowing, rapid sequence, and the momentum of war so that Turnus’s fall doesn’t feel arbitrary but the natural, inevitable culmination of the narrative arc—providing the ending with a strong, satisfying closure. This reading sees the moment as the political and moral resolution of the epic: it finalizes the hero’s duty, locates the founding of Rome within a frame that has been prepared by the poem’s long arc, and brings the long arc of violence to a decisive finish. In contrast, the other options don’t foreground this sense of culmination tied to Turnus’s death in the same way—one centers on broad plot structure, another on the death scene but not the ending’s crafted, climactic release, and the last emphasizes battle scenes rather than the resolution of the ending itself.

The ending’s explosive release is best understood as a deliberately earned climax, where the death of Turnus serves as the moment that finally releases all the built‑up tension of the epic. Denis Feeney emphasizes how Virgil threads foreshadowing, rapid sequence, and the momentum of war so that Turnus’s fall doesn’t feel arbitrary but the natural, inevitable culmination of the narrative arc—providing the ending with a strong, satisfying closure. This reading sees the moment as the political and moral resolution of the epic: it finalizes the hero’s duty, locates the founding of Rome within a frame that has been prepared by the poem’s long arc, and brings the long arc of violence to a decisive finish. In contrast, the other options don’t foreground this sense of culmination tied to Turnus’s death in the same way—one centers on broad plot structure, another on the death scene but not the ending’s crafted, climactic release, and the last emphasizes battle scenes rather than the resolution of the ending itself.