The End of The End

Finally, the story about the end of the world has come to an end. "Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counter-spectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence." (274) McCarthy makes it sound beautiful, the way in which everything has stopped being, the moment in which things stop becoming what they once were and the creation process reverses.

I have to say that I found the ending to be extremely sad, and naturally being a girl, I was disappointed to find that there is no hope of everything being perfect and a happily ever after. Even though it was expected that McCarthy wasn't going to fix it all at the end, I always had my hopes up that a random government would come and save all survivors and the man and the boy would live a long, complete life. The sad ending was necessary, though, because the author wanted to make the statement that messing with the Earth has consequences that cannot be reversed.

Anyway, for those who didn't know, at the end the man dies. He doesn't have the guts to take his son with him, so the boy is left alone in the middle of nowhere to mourn the death of his only companion. Luckily, (or not?) a man finds the boy, and asks him to join their "tribe." With nothing left to lose, and the promise of more kids his age, the boy decides to take the risk and trust them as good guys. The boy, as promised, talks to the dead man often and never forgets him. The reader is left hoping that the new guys are also "carrying the fire."

The last lines in McCarty's The Road confused me a little. In the last paragraph, the author wrote "...On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." (287) I like how the ending is a lot more complex than the rest of the story, showing that the importance is the effect of the story and not the content itself.

It is saying that the world was on its way to becoming something else, starting a new road. It could never be what it was before, but there is still hope for a new world. Also, it mentions "older than man," which means that the world has been alive for a lot longer than humans have been walking in it. Even though humans were responsible for its destruction, only the human part of the world is now gone, and all that is older than humans has survived in the eyes of those who are there to witness it.