Can someone explain the ending?

1) No, he walks out of the hospital with his wife at the end.

2) The killer was himself. He used his mental image of the Singing Detective to kill his "old self", i.e., his old, neurotic self who couldn't form a healthy relationship with any woman, and thus emerged healthy and ready to reconcile with his wife.

3) Doesn't really matter. Most of the Nazi story is just a red herring to show how his own memories are getting mixed up with the novel he wrote.

4) Hmmm... I'll have to get back to you on this, but obviously, his relationship with his dad was kind of complicated.

5) He and his mother moved to London from the rural Forest of Dean; I believe this was so she could try to find work in the city.

6) That's the essential mystery of the whole story. It's ambiguous. The scene takes place in London, while his father is still in the Forest of Dean, but perhaps he's "symbolically" running back to his father.

7) That's all in his imagination. Someone was pulled out of the river, but it's unclear whether his mother actually died that, way, or died in the subway, or died some other way (remember that the psychiatrist is extremely skeptical that Marlow's mother died the exact same way as the woman in the book, i.e. in the river).

The fact that they pull "Sonya" out of the river at one point, and we later see the same actress playing a prostitute that the younger, real-life Marlow hired while he was living next to the Hammersmith Bridge, opens the question of what happened to her, and to what degree he is mixing up his memories of her with his memories of his mother.

Note also that his skin disease is referred to in both the prostitute scene and the subway scene.

I know I'm shouting, I like to shout.

[deleted]

Here are a few possible answers:

-Of course the protagonist doesn't die -remember, it was a fantasy gunfight. But symbolically, Philip does away with his old, tormented, sickly, frozen self -and accepts to tackle the world; he starts anew -see how the old male chauvinist smart alec now interacts with the nurse re. his writing ability, and how he is even polite to his fellow sufferers.

-The subplot or apparent main plot (in the "Mullholand Drive" sense, that is): well, we don't know. We are not told who killed the 40s art collector. For my money, this is a red herring, a Hitchockian "McGuffin": it doesn't matter. It's a product of Marlow's (imagination) need to inject suspense in his own tragic, bitter life.

-The two minions. There are clear echoes of Pirandello here (characters in search of a story) and Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. At some point, one of them even complains that he hasn't been given a name! Very post-modern.

-Interestingly, you use the word "hide". Young Philip -who has been shown spending a lot of time on his own- hides while his father grieves; then he no longer does, and goes to join/comfort him, rejoins the human community. He steps up to the hard task of, y' know, living.

-I long suspected that his mum (the great A. Steadman) threw herself under the incoming metro ...but it would make more sense that she drowned herself -thereby paving the way for the sublimated version starring the beautiful prostitute (in the pulp fiction subplot).

-Nicola doesn't kill her lover! It's just Marlow's twisted revenge fantasy. She does, however, reject him after realising that he doesn't care for her and will accept an American actress in the main part, as well as a much more substantial retribution than she expected. The last image shows her back with Marlow, aaahhh...


Go check out the seminal study(do ignore the surreal last part, though) "The Seven Basic Plots". "The Singing Detective" belongs to the self-realisation category: like "A Winter's Tale", it's about a protagonist coming out of his/her derangement and facing up to reality.

Someone can.

Perhaps the OP just wants to reach out for some sense of community.