We can't read this passage without tearing up. This is the world human beings lose in The Road – either through their own self-destructiveness or through some random disaster. It's almost as if, though, in this memory of the past there's a pattern for how the world might begin again. McCarthy says: "On their backs were vermiculate [like worms!] 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."

We know McCarthy says the disaster can't be undone, or made right. But don't you hold out some hope that deep in a glen there's still a brook trout with the pattern of the world on its back? And that somehow the world can be reconstructed from that pattern? It's possible, of course, that we've fallen into the very trap The Man tries hard to avoid: nostalgia for a lost world.

We're unsure about this dream. It's definitely important, though, because a similar one appears in the first paragraph of the novel. (Perhaps it has something to do with traveling through an evil and fallen world?) We do want to point out this little factoid: The Boy is literally carrying the fire here. (OK, it's a candle – but that's good enough, right?) So, as The Man gets closer and closer to death, he dreams (or imagines?) that The Boy holds their candle in the dark cave of the world.

We find this passage really moving. Earlier in the novel, The Man rips a blanket off a corpse in an abandoned house. It's not a cruel or indecent act; it's just an example of how desperate things have become. Now, at the very end of the novel, The Boy makes sure his father's body is covered, even though it means leaving behind a valuable warm blanket.