This award-winning best seller has a more conventional plot and structure than is typical of most McCarthy novels. The concluding paragraph with its image of a bull rolling in the dust may make the novel seem open-ended, but the novel actually employs some conventional structures. The final image is of John Grady Cole riding off into the sunset, a typical ending for a Western.

There is also a circularity to the novel since it begins and ends with funerals, both of which cause dispossession and alienation. After his long trek, John Grady winds up at the end of the novel basically where he began — in Texas.

This novel also has a love story as a significant subplot, and besides the funeral McCarthy places another ceremony near the end of the novel — a wedding, which would be the conventional ending of a happy love story or comedy...