The climactic event in The Member of the Wedding is ... elided.

One of the strangest aspects of Carson McCullers's "The Member of the Wedding" is that - there's no wedding. Or, more accurately, the wedding, the climactic event toward which the whole novella seems to be building, is elided: throughout the first two sections, about 80 percent of the novel I would guess, we focus on Frankie Addams, and the issue or problem that sets the story in motion is that her brother is getting married in 2 days and she wants to, and expects to, go off with brother and bride and travel the world with them, live with them: she's obviously a very lonely and odd young (12) girl, very needy, precocious in some ways and terribly immature in others. We never expect the brother - whom we barely see anywhere in this novel - to take her with him, and it's not clear whether she truly expects that or is just articulating a fantasy. In any case, we never "see" what happens: Frankie goes off to the wedding in a nearby town, and then, bang, the next scene she's riding home in a bus and crying. The main dramatic moment is not dramatized. That makes us think: maybe the novel isn't what it seems, maybe it's not about the wedding at all bu about Frankie and her coming of age: her encounter with a soldier who tries to pick her up - she's incredibly naive to go into a hotel room with him, and incredibly mature to bash him over the head - shockingly, this girl who rattles on about everything to strangers, never tells anyone about this episode as far as we can see. Frankie will seem to many like a precursor to Holden Caulfield - even though she doesn't narrate her own story, so much is told through dialogue that we have her voice in our heads as clear as any narrative voice - but like HC she has that mixture of cockiness, worldliness, toughness, set against neediness, vulnerability, and naivete. The last section of the novel give us a little glimpse into a somewhat later - a year? two? - in Frankie's life, and we can see that she will move on, make friends, albeit other misfits like herself, will suffer and grow from her suffering. It's a much tougher and more unflinching novel than I'd expected - I think the movie version, from what I can recall, made Frankie more cute and sweet - and a very powerful delineation, mostly through dialogue, or a character, but it does feel like a short story extended to gargantuan, without the development, action, and complex web of relationships that we generally expect in a novel.