“Dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you?”: An Exploration of the Ending in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel The Road chronicles the journey of a father and son through a world almost entirely denuded of life, in which the remaining humans are dying or eating each other, and in which there is no hope for long-term survival of any life on earth. After the father dies, a stranger miraculously appears to take the son away from the road to a family that meets every hallmark of the son’s desire. The unsettling anachronism of this deus-ex-machina man is so discordant with the apparent nihilism of the rest of the book and McCarthy’s previous works that it demands a careful reading to understand its meaning. Since McCarthy has never written a happy ending before, and has written vivid descriptions of dreams and laid hints throughout the book about their significance, it is at least possible that this happy ending is the boy’s wishful dream.