Baffled

I can only imagine McCarthy sitting somewhere desolate, isolated, feeling very proud of himself for creating one of the most baffling endings of all time.

By the end of The Road, we know someone has died. By normal clues, you are led to believe that the man has died, but my spidey senses are tingling. I suspect the boy might have actually died. After all, one does not simply walk into mordoor, nor does one simply walk away from weeks of high fever and malnutrition.

As was earlier stated, the boy was incredibly sick just before the death. The author failed to explain how or why he got miraculously better, and I refuse to believe it, honestly.

In addition, the man talks about not being able to go with the boy, which sounds like the boy is dying and leaving him, to me. Granted that he might have been talking about not being able to walk down the road with him anymore, but considering what happens next, I'm led to think that the man is actually saying he can't die with the boy. Or at least that he can't go to the same sort of afterlife.

When whoever dies, the boy is sort of "collected" by another man. Explain to me, though, how out of all the people we've met on the road, all the scoundrels, cannibals, cadavers, thieves, and cutthroats, we have at last one man and an entire family able to survive and willing to take him in. Isn't this what the boy has been dreaming of the entire time? Wouldn't that serve as HIS heaven??

Mostly I can't get past the fact that, once he is dead and with this family, he is told about God. And what's funny is that if he's in heaven like I suspect, he doesn't believe in God traditionally. And that's cool, I'm good with that. But now he's come to worship his "father" and pray to him as if he were a lost God. In a child's eyes, totally understandable.

Not quite sure what McCarthy was trying to say about the rest of society, there. I'm gonna go with something along the lines of "God is dead if you perceive him to be. God is perceivable through each one of us".