[SeattleUte]

I think actually the book is pretty bleak, thematically and dramatically. I think it's about the need to keep trying even when you have absolutely no reason for hope. It's about an ethic of hope absent rational basis for hope. I think he had to give that sliver of reason for hope in the last paragraphs as a suggestion or a hope that there is always reason to hope even if it seems like there isn't. But the novel is pretty bleak. The payoff for the father contining to try is really just those few years he spent with his son amid that blasted environment. That should be enough, hard as such a life was, the novel tells us.