Extinguishing Humanity: Thinking About the End of _The Road_

I'm teaching The Road by Cormac McCarthy to my English 102 students, and we have finally come to the end of the book. The final paragraph is one of the most contested paragraphs in contemporary literature:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. 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.

Many read the final sentence as a sign that the world will survive whatever cataclysmic event prompted the man's and the boy's journey in the first place. They read the final sentence to say that the trout are alive and have survived what nothing else could. It's a very optimistic reading, in my opinion. And yet, The Road does end on a note of optimism. Though the man dies, the boy is not raped or eaten by cannibals as his mother feared would happen to them. Instead, he is taken in by another family-- more "good guys." The man has spent most of the journey in extreme fear and paranoia (for good reason), but in the end we find there are still good people in the world. And, if we read the final paragraph to indicate that brook trout have survived the apocalypse, then the man's incessant push to survive, his hope against all hope, pays off. It is the most elemental struggle, the struggle to survive. The man's notion that the boy, messiah-like, carries "the flame," whether that be the flame of goodness, faith, or life, ends up being true.

I take a more pessimistic approach. I latch on to the first word of the last paragraph: "Once." As in "Once upon at time...". The final paragraph indicates neither survival nor success nor truth. Instead, it indicates a choice. It undercuts the story of survival and goes beneath the something much more human and points to the truth not that survival is imminent but that it is a choice. The decisions that we make have cumulative and, in some cases, catastrophic outcomes. "On their backs were vermiculate patters 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." The text points to a course of events that cannot be reproduced or traced in reverse. It is weighted with warning that what is done now cannot be undone. And yet it beams with a positive view of humanity, that we can make the better decisions yet.

Whenever a friend or colleague finds out I am teaching this book, they comment on how depressing it is. I agree. And yet, what I really like about this book isn't what it says or describes about the last breaths of a dying world. Instead, I love this book because it constantly reminds me about what is outside the text-- literally. It makes me look up, take a deep breath, and say, in the voice of Louis Armstrong, "what a wonderful world." The catch is, the choice to make it a wonderful world are up to us.