The Road, Reading Blog #15 - Endings

The Road is one of those stories in which the ending is drastically different from the rest of the story, and at the same time, exactly the same. After the man dies, and the boy grieves, and talks to him, and they are safe -- after all the plotlines are tied up, the narrative describes fish. Or, put another way, after discussing the meaning of life, the narrative discusses the meaning of life.

The last paragraph describes trout, that once lived with mysterious, ancient things and carried maps of "the world in its becoming" on their backs (287). Additionally, the narrator comments that the world, as it was then, "could not be put back. Not be made right again" (287) which was one of the book's central themes. The boy and the man can be destroyed, and they can heal, but they can never undo the damage. Innocence, complete purity, can never be regained, not for them, and certainly not for the world. It can survive, to some extent, but never the way it was initially. That purity ended a long time before the story did. Sometimes, it's better to not be innocent; many would say that experience gives people strength. But this was not true for the world, which couldn't withstand any of the damages people caused. In the story, it was never made right again -- as it likely will not be in this reality either. The boy, too, will never be completely right, or innocent, again. The boy will grow up. The boy will live. What else can he do?