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

[Miamla]

here we go girls

shall i start? the ending is absolutely bloody ridiculous! Who's next?

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)

I agree with you about it being about hope, about the boy carrying the fire after his father died etc but i'm sure mr mcCarthy could have come up with something better for the end! its almost like he got bored of writing it and just wanted to end it as quickly as he could. I really wanted to find out how the boy would cope on his own, only for a little while but only if he managed wonderfully!

The bond (albeit a forced one) between father and son was so fiercely strong. I thought it was great how he obviously wanted to protect his son from the horrors but also realised that there was too much happening for him to be protected from everything. There were numerous times I just wanted to scoop the boy up to give him a hug and to give his father a well deserved pat on the back.

Has anyone read anything else by him? I really liked his style of writing just not his style of ending!

Cop out.

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".

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).

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.

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?

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...

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.

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

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

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.

Troutpout, not a good idea surely to take The Road on a camping trip :-) Far too bleak & dark a read for a holiday, I think... (Come to think of it, far too bleak & dark for everyday life too!)

Oh no...i am not the shivering under a tarp type of camper at all. I am a carpets,stripy curtains and spotty plate type camper. In fact it's not really camping at all.

I thought the end was a success, sorry

I really thought that it was about the father taking him as far as he possibly could

he could teach him moral lessons and keep him alive but he didn't have the skills to actually make a life in this new horrific world, he only had the skills to keep them moving. He was of the old world that had burned, whereas the new family were a future. When he died it freed the boy off to go make a future.

It was so quick and tidy because the story wasn't about the boy's life, it was about his journey to that point

You do have a point there Really- I mean, about the fact that the book was about father & son's journey & not the boy's life. Still, to me the ending seemed essentially unsatisfying. But to be honest, not sure which ending would have felt right to me in such a book...

I thought the ending was absolutely right. All the way through you were led to believe the father was taking care of the son, but actually it was the other way around. Ultimately youth must supplant the old - so Shakespeare tells us in all his late plays.

When the boy is discovered by the second man, he has a female partner which to me suggests the cycle of life, birth and growth. All very truthful and realistic forces. even in the worst disasters - wars, famines and pestilence - children are born and make a life for themselves.People survive. Just look at the news. That is how I read the ending of this novel. A 'cop out' would have been for both the man and his son to die.

Oh heavens, it drove me batty! I wanted to talk about this (I read it a week or 2 ago).

I just couldn't imagine a disaster that would lead to no other living things except (somehow) people. Even bacteria seemed to have all died (so the water was ok to drink). There was mildew, but no moss or lichens. There were no cockroaches or insect life. Not even living on the many corpses (like inside the truck on the bridge). It made no sense(!). There was plenty of water, but there had been awful firestorms (nuclear war?). But then somehow there was no radiation killing everyone instead.

And yes, end felt like a bit of a cop-out, although I admit that I also would have hated a depressing ending where they both died.

I can see it was masterfully written, I can understand the metaphors you're all pulling out, but the gruesome lengths humans went to survive, how were they part of those metaphors? So I'm brought back to the plausibility of the story... which wasn't plausible.

But didn't the father have radiation sickness? Coughing blood etc. Radiation wouldn't make all people ill at the same rate though (not a scientist) so some would seem well for a while I think?

I thought it could be TB.

or lung cancer.

Lots of interesting views on this thread. Thanks

Somehow, I didn't really think it was a nuclear war that cause the disaster when I was reading the book.

Ah, yes, that's another huge issue about the book, WHAT was the disaster that led to all this? Could it be a virus? A nuclear war? Something altogether different? I think the author must have purposefully left it vague for us to wonder & figure it out ourselves...

I didn't think the end was a cop out; I wondered whether at other times in the book they might have found other 'friends' but the father's paranoia meant that there would be no opportunity for that. I'm thinking of when they feel they are being watched in the deserted town? (read it a while back so hope that is right). I agree with reallyreally about the father only taking him so far.

The more I think about the book though, the less I like it. I finished it just full of shock and sadness, but as time has gone on I don't think it is really a great novel. It's a brilliant story about two people in an awful situation, but I didn't feel that the utter bleakness always rang true. Ditto the disaster that caused this - I couldn't work out what it could be.

Has anyone read On the Beach by Neville Shute? Because reading The Road made me think of that, which although it is full of 1950s people facing the end in a polite organised way(!) I think in some ways is a more powerful 'end of the world' novel because the science and scenario feels more plausible and the sense of the world as a whole is stronger than The Road.

Becky: I've read On The Beach. I love these dystopian apocalptic novels.

Can I REALLY also recommend John Christopher: The Death of Grass and The Winkle in the Skin are both utterly brilliant and very very similar genre. These were written in the 1960s and similar to John Wyndham in style but very McCarthy in theme. You will LOVE them.