Final Reaction

In the end of the book, John Grady Cole has nothing; He has lost his dad, his love, his innocence, and even his country. He doesn’t know who he is or what defines him. The end is actually quite depressing. “It was good that God kept the truths of life from the young as they were starting out or else they’d have no heart to start at all” (284). Here, we see that Cole is disappointed in what he found in the world. The pain and suffering he endured wasn’t worth it in the end.

However, there is a little hope, as I have discussed earlier. Using the same quote, “He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower,” We can see that Cole is still hopeful in that the world will someday show him it’s beauty. The last sentence of the book reads, “Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.” The dark imagery in this sentence makes it feel depressing, but then it also hopeful in that Cole is once again facing this world that has given him such a hard time.

John Grady left his home as a lost boy, but he comes home not only as a man, but also as a hero. Cole took on a journey in which he lost his innocence along with other important things. What makes him a hero? John Grady had never been exposed to the Mexican violence he saw and took part in on his journey. He had never fallen in love. He had never been on his own. But John Grady did all of this when he left home, and he did it with pride. Only once did he cry in this story, and that was at the end when he realized his father was dead. He took all the world had to offer, even though most of it wasn't what he wanted or expected. And after all his troubles, he had the strength to go on and keep searching for the beauty in the world. This makes Cole a hero.