作者在给评论家Kermode的信里写了自己在结局中想表达的：
Dear Professor Kermode,
I hope you won’t mind my writing to you, partly because I’ve relied so long and so much on The Sense of an Ending in trying to teach university candidates something about fiction – most of them, too, with a half-finished novel of their own in a drawer back at home – but also to thank you for what you wrote about me in The London Review of Books. Could I make one comment – you said in passing that the ‘apocalyptic flood’ at the end of Offshore wasn’t a success and I expect it isn’t, but it isn’t really meant as apocalyptic either – I only wanted the Thames to drift out a little way with the characters whom in the end nobody particularly wants or lays claim to. It seems to me that not to be wanted is a positive condition and I hoped to find some way of indicating that. – I realise too that the danger of writing novels, even very short ones, is that you get to take yourself too seriously –
Yours sincerely,
Penelope Fitzgerald
好心痛，Morris最后是那个别人不需要的人，作者在访谈里说自己为什么写作的时候提到过Morris的原型一个风度翩翩的男模，原型的结局最后是投水自杀了，而Morris被风暴带走：
1. First, because something inside me compels me to tell stories. I mean that I get great satisfaction out of making people believe that this event happened at that time. Unlike history, fiction can proceed with confidence.
For example: a few years ago we were living on a Thames barge, and on the boat next door lived an elegant young male model. He saw that I was rather down in the dumps, a middle-aged woman shabbily dressed and tired, and he took me on a day-out to the sea, to Brighton. We went on all the rides and played all the slot machines. We walked for a while on the beach, then caught an open-top bus along the front. What happiness!
A few days later he went back to Brighton, by himself, and walked into the sea until it had closed over his head and he drowned. But when I made him a character in one of my books, I couldn’t bear to let him kill himself. That would have meant that he had failed in life, whereas, really, his kindness made him the very symbol of success in my eyes.
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