(Credit: Netflix)

Train Dreams on Netflix commences with the introduction of Robert Grainier’s world, ending decades later with the protagonist flying high up in the sky in a biplane, observing the same earth from the bird’s eye point of view, where he had spent his life among the towering forest.

While Robert’s life has been marked by an insurmountable amount of love and loss, leaving him with nothin much of material value, the narrator still says in the end that Robert “felt, at last, connected to it all.”

Train Dreams is a tale of a life lived and packed with moments of enthusiasm, grief, solitude and community, fulfilment and regret. It is the story of Robert, whose life is rooted in profound simplicity, having lived most of his years within the space of a few hundred square miles in the Pacific Northwest.

Directed by Clint Bentley, Train Dreams is adapted from Denis Johnson’s 2011 novella, and follows Robert, his fellow loggers, and railroad workers of the 20th century who built bridges to a future they barely got to live. While the adaptation is packed with the contrasts of a lived experience at a time when major changes were taking place, what happens at the end of the Netflix film?

What happens to Gladys and Katie?

Robert has experienced his fair share of isolation in life, except for the time he shared with Gladys, his wife. He never really found anyone “attracting his interest,” until he met Gladys, who “introduced herself as if women did things like that every day.” Their love story paces slowly with thought and consideration to the point that it nearly comes as a surprise when they one day look around to observe the life they have built.

Gladys and Robert’s love story is a poignant one, which is only enriched by the birth of their daughter, Kaie. So, even when Robert spends long hours at work, he’s always connected to his home because he carries the thoughts of his family everywhere.

But then one fine day, when on his way home, he finds smoke and flames choking up the sky. He jumps into the fire, frantically searching for any clues about his wife and daughter, only to find they are gone. Despite the tragedy, he must learn to make a new day out of his life, and so it happens as the natural world around him begins to regenerate.

In a conversation with Tudum, Greg Kwedar says, “It’s a movie about how to choose light again after loss. He could have let his spirit fully be destroyed, and yet [he recovers] partly through the renewal that happens around [him in] the forest, but also largely due to the kindness of friends and strangers, and the role that other people play in navigating pain and loss in our lives.”

Is Katie the “wolf girl”? Also, what happened to Fu Sheng?

As Robert learns to grapple with the realities of his life without his wife and daughter, he starts feeling haunted by their absence, along with other scars of his life, including the time when he stood and saw the murder of one of his fellow railroad workers, Fu Sheng, with his own eyes.

Robert’s emotional suffering heightens with the visions of this man whose death has flooded his thoughts for years now, and he cannot help but try to figure out the connection between these events of his life. “We feel [Fu Sheng’s] presence across the entire film, reverberating through Grainier’s life as he’s grappling with grief and the guilt of the experience that he had with [him.]”

“There was something that Alfred talked about. An [important] aspect of the movie is making note of the Chinese immigrant population, who really built a lot of the railroad infrastructure and then were not celebrated throughout history for that,” he continues.

While Fu Sheng’s visits to Robert are only psychological, he does get visited by someone gradually in the film whose aura evokes his daughter, years after her death. After falling sick with severe fever, a girl resembling more of a wolf winds up at his home, wounded. The protagonist is unsure if he’s hallucinating, and the narrator confirms, saying, “he knew it was impossible,” yet he wants to believe it’s his daughter who has come home and only he has it in him to heal her.

“It’s not exactly clear if it’s actually what’s happening, or if it’s just happening in his mind. But it’s his way of processing his grief, this kind of strange reunion with his daughter – or with this child who may or may not be his daughter,” Bentley explains.

How does Claire help Robert?

Robert has long recoiled from the rest of the world, left scarred by the loss of his wife and daughter, when he meets Claire Thompson. In a way, she comes across as everything Robert never had a shot at being: Claire’s a globetrotter who lives a life of adventure. But even with all those differences, she isn’t someone who judges. She tells him instead, “The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.”

Claire isn’t very different from Robert since she has also witnessed tragedy and lives a life isolated from the world. But unlike him, she has a different way to embrace her reality because she has come to terms with her solitude.

What happens at the end of Train Dreams?

Robert’s life is defined by the extraordinary things that stem from profound ordinariness. And Train Dreams concludes with Robert being alone again. He is walking down the streets of Spokane, Washington, stopping by a store window at a TV airing an astronaut’s orbit around the Earth. “Oh, is that…?” he thinks out loud, watching the curve of the planet when a woman tells him, “That’s us.”

Although Robert might never comprehend his life entirely, he makes one realise the importance of going on, despite the intensity of the moments that come their way, happy or sad. This doesn’t mean that the journey or the experience would be one and the same for all. They would indefinitely differ, but it would connect each and every one in ways they cannot see.

Coming one last time to the story, the last of Robert we see as viewers is when he is flying high up in the plane as the pilot tells him, “Hey, you’d better hold onto something.”