SPOILER WARNING - this thread is for us to chat about the ending of ''The Road'' by Cormac McCarthy

I didn't think the ending was a cop out - it was more that it was proof that what they had been trying to find was there all along - that these rumours of a safe haven were fact and not just rumour. Like at the end of the film (i've not read the book) of I am Legend where they do get to the place in Vermont that Will Smith didn't think was there.

Oh not a good book for camping surely. All that shuddering and shivering under the tarp and eating tinned peaches.

Oh i read this miserable book over the weekend (took it camping)
God...by the end i was willing for some blardy zombie to come and eat them both!
How many times can 2 people be so close to starvation and nearly die !
Die dammit!
Oh and what luck we have just stumbled on a fully stocked waitrose! phew! that was a close thing!
I was so bored by the end that it didn't even care what happened to the boy

But the ending isn't neat though because what will happen to the boy? There is no solution when the planet is dead.

Am interested in Maria's idea that it was all a fantasy by the boy.

And, yes, there were a lot of convenient findings of food in the book. But the book was so powerful that I simply refuse to believe Cormac McCarthy would have a convenient cop-out ending. No, no, not listening.

I didn't like the ending, for me it didn't work with the rest of the book. It was all a bit too neat and unlikely, the entire book was so dark the happy ending just didn't quite fit for me.

The only other book I've read by Cormac McCarthy was 'No country for old men'. I enjoyed most of it but not the miserable ending. The rest of the story wasn't exactly a bundle of laughs but the end just seemed pointlessly unpleasant.

I guess I'm just never satisfied whichever way he ends his books...

I liked the ending and I'm not one for soppy stuff.

It was as if the boy could finally live his own life in this crap, dark world, which was actually his world and not his fathers. He was born into it. His father had to hang onto the values of the past but I thought his son could now move onward to the future, foul though it was. The other family were just a means to this. I wondered earlier on if the son maybe couldn't see the problem with cannibalism. It makes sense in his here and now, just not to his father's old values.

dyswim?

but isn't there some foreshadowing of finding what you need just as you hit your lowest ebb? finding the apples after seeing the people in the cellar? the bunker full of food when they are dying of starvation? i kind of thought that was the whole point, that the struggle for survival was made bearable by these moments which fulfilled the boy's faith in life and humanity.

OK I'm probably alone in this but I thought the ending was not actually real but a fantasy that the boy had to help him get over his father's death! I really did find it unbelievable that he would just come across this perfect family who would take him off the road & help him. Which is why it seemed more fantasy than reality to me (particularly since in other parts of the book the boy kept wanting to see & befriend other children, dogs etc).

didn't feel let down by the end at all. it seemed a natural way to end the novel given the boy's enduring faith throughout. it's not as though everything was going to be ok in the end... the survivors were still going to face all the horrors that we'd witnessed. it's not as if all the baddies were overcome.

i've only read "all the pretty horses" and i didn't much like it. maybe i should revisit it though, given how much i liked "the road".

Cop out.

Oh yes, I didn't like it at all! It was such a searing, unflinching story all the way through and then - 'Oh no, the boy is all on his own in an unforgiving world...oh hang on, no he's not because a nice family have come along to take him as their own, even though practically everyone else we have met in the book is a baby-eating savage - what luck!' I suppose it was meant to be about hope, the enduring human spirit or somesuch but it didn't ring true to the rest of the book for me.

Interestingly, our Book Group was quite polarised about it - some felt like they needed a 'happy' ending after reading the rest of the book. (I will nudge them to come along here and fight discuss)