No Hope for the Hopeless

McCarthy ends his story in a very bleak way. Before reading the articles about Hemingway I didn't know he was illuding to a second piece of writing but after reading the excerpt it's clear what he was trying to say. McCarthy makes this comparison to Hemingway because he wants there to be a drastic difference between the way the stories end. For Hemingway the image of the trout in the river meant hope, it meant new life. It encourages the reader to look beyond their immediate surrounding to find the good in life and what it's worth. Then there's McCarthy's ending, McCarthy specifically talks of a time when the man remembered trout in the river, it's a memory for him, not something that is current. He wants the reader to understand that there's a difference between the world there was and the world that there is not. He wants to reader to feel the hopelessness, to understand that the world will never be the same as it was ever again and that they have to accept that. That's similar to the world after 9/11, it changed things for American's and the entire world. People lost family, a city lost their beakon and a country lost thier sense of security. America was no longer infallible and that was a hard pill for an entire nation to swallow. When wars start in other countries now people legitimately worry about another attack, because 9/11 was not only a warning to us of our weakness but to our enemies that our weaknesses are there. 

I think the story is about 9/11 in the way that it's not about what happened but how people have to deal with it.  The relationship between the father and the son is something showing the difference in generations, the children still filled with hope and goodness but the parents, old enough to understand what happened and become jaded by it all.