It Used to Be

The last paragraph of The Road could be described as out of place.

Here it is:
"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate 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. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."

Hmm. It's clearly there for a purpose. It definitely doesn't match up with the style of the rest of the book, and uses significantly vivid adjectives that are not used in any other part of the book (with the exception of dreams). I'll get back to the dream thing.

Well, the trout could be nature, what used to be, what is not anymore. From here we can also infer that the apocalypse was an environmental collapse.

Before men arrived to this world, earth had its own beauty, its own mystery, its own life.
Then we came, and used everything and destroyed everything until things became things "which could not be put back." Now, all these glorious things are but a dream, only to be remembered, only as things that once used to be there but have now been transformed into ashes.


The Road ends with yet another dream, only that this dream isn't a dream. It's real.
Or at least it used to be.