Cormac McCarthy ends The Road with these lines to give beauty to memories long since forgotten, and to tell the story of both the earth and mankind. Throughout the novel, the author uses descriptions as a way to add beauty the world. During the last paragraph of the novel, the author describes the appearance of trout, long since gone from the world: “You could see standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. Polished and muscular in torsion”(McCarthy 286). Trout, are talked about in the story fleetingly when the man and the boy are looking for food, and they are not often brought up again. The author uses the description of the Trout to give a sense of beauty of the world that we are living in. By using the world around us to paint a picture in the reader's head, the author better establishes a sense of wanting to reclaim the world that use to be. Earlier in the novel the author uses the same technique when describing …show more content…
In McCarthy’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world, the sun has gone out and the snow has become ashen gray, with an unidentifiable amount of humans still living in the world. When describing the trout, the author makes a statement about the patterns that envelope their backs: “On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Of a thing which could not be put back”(McCarthy 287). The author uses the trout, because of the length of time that they have been on the earth, as a symbol for how long the world has kept evolving. The “maps of the world” is a way for saying that the world has been shaped forever and will keep on changing. The world, with or without man, will keep on becoming something new. The trout are a record of the time that the earth has been around, and a reminder that the earth will one day change for the better or for the worse, and we won't be there to do