The End

All you could wait for was death. Hope had finally dried out and there was nothing that could save them now. The man was too weak to keep going and there was nothing left for him but the end. He had promised to never leave his son alone, but when the moment finally came, he wasn’t able to stay with him. Regardless of always having planned to leave this world together, he couldn’t bring himself to shoot him and end it all. He knew that the boy still had a future ahead of him. He knew he would be able to survive, and this gave him reason to let him live on. He would always be with him, no matter what, but he had to keep on living. It’s the end of the man, but the kid will move on and carry the fire, in hopes of finding the good guys, and possibly find a better world.

Cormac McCarthy’s novel had a great impact on me as a reader. Not only did it make me realize how dependant our survival is of nature, but the lengths at which kindness, sacrifice and love are able to stretch. Throughout the pair’s journey, we constantly see the sacrifice of the man for his son to his last breath. We can see the way the child has preserved values like compassion from being wiped from the face of that heartless world. Transcending through hunger, cold, fear and despair, the bond of love that kept them together helped them complete their voyage through the decadence of life and the last coughing breaths of Mother Nature, slowly fading under the cover of ashes.

According to McCarthy, his inspiration to writing this novel came from a vision he had of a city, imagining it in one hundred years burning in fire, and this novel seem to be the image of what he imagined would come after. The fact that there would be continuation after the apocalypses shows that even to him, not everything will be lost.

This novel was a mixture of the crude and savage with the warm and tender. Cormac’s novel proves that even in the most arduous situations, there is always a little light of hope, lying in the noble heart of a young boy, born from the ashes and carrying the fire that will save humans from their imminent death. What this child represents is the assurance that even when everything points towards the final end, there will always be hope, and hope is all that man needs to survive.