End of The Road

Having finished The Road last week, I must say that I very pleased and enjoyed it immensely. I was attached to the characters the whole time, I understood a lot of the underlying messages of the story and had a style that was very fluid and easy to read. The setting of The Road was incredible. The way McCarthy created the setting was almost perfect. He was able to create a type of environment that no one has ever experienced, but at the same time make it feel like you have lived in it. The use of a road as the main setting was genius. Everyone in the world has experienced or seen some kind of road before in their life, so it's very easy to envision a road covered in ash. There were only 2 things that I didn't really like about this novel. First, at some points, the story seemed to move very slow. This mainly happened when the boy and the man stopped moving on the road. The dialogue during these parts were very boring and usually consisted of the man saying a short phrase and the boy responding with one word. I know that this kind of dialogue is important for the readers to understand the characters more, but I don't understand why McCarthy had to make whole scenes that boring. The second thing I disliked about this novel was the ending. I have read some novels that have pretty terrible endings, and while this ending may not be as bad as some of those, it is definitely not a very good one. McCarthy leaves us with the boy going to some group we know nothing about, besides that they have a veteran and a religious woman, and doesn't give us any closure about what happens to him in the future. For all we now, the group could have gotten the boy fatter and then eaten him. The story builds up too much about how the boy IS the future of Earth to just leave us with that kind o ending. I want to know if he turns out saving the human race by bringing the survivors together, or if he did something like become emperor of the world. But, overall this was a great novel, and has definitely lived up to the good things people say about it.