The novel ends with John Grady riding off into the sunset like a good cowboy, but this is no John Wayne-style happy ending. Though the hero has been toughened by his experiences, he finds himself in a land in which he no longer belongs. As he rides on, some Native Americans watch as he passes, having "no curiosity about him at all," watching "solely because he was passing. Solely because he would vanish"—as though that fact was all they needed to know (4050), reducing John to a mere emblem of mortality. Fun stuff.
A Violent End?
John rides off into a sunset that is instead heavily suggestive of violence, thick with the color red:
The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised [...]. In the evening a wind came up and reddened all the sky before him. There were few cattle in that country because it was barren country indeed yet he came at evening upon a solitary bull rolling in the dust against the bloodred sunset like an animal in sacrificial torment. The bloodred dust blew down out of the sun. (4051)
Not exactly a pretty image, is it? (One usually doesn't think of blood that way, but hey, your mileage may vary.)
One might guess that John isn't about to go off and die or anything; after all, during his trip from Saltillo to see Alejandra, he experiences a kindness from strangers that the narrator says he will remember for a long time afterward.
But the closing sentence fragment suggests the road won't be pretty: John and his horses "passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come" (4051). So is John going to continue wandering in his lonely way, cheating death and living on the frontier? Or will he settle down and recover something of what he lost when Alejandra walked out of his life? The novel doesn't provide any easy answers, so we're left to our own speculatin' devices.