Tombstone Blues

Tombstone Blues is a Bob Dylan song whose lyrics appear in the closing pages of The Shadow Exploded. There, a passage from the song is offered as Carrie White’s epitaph, giving the song a final, elegiac role in the book’s account of her life and death.

Earlier Dylan Reference

The book also recalls a page in one of Carrie White’s school notebooks on which a line by Bob Dylan had been written repeatedly, apparently in desperation. The passage does not identify that notebook line as coming from Tombstone Blues; instead, it establishes an earlier recurrence of Dylan’s work in Carrie’s story, setting the closing song lyrics within a broader pattern of reference.

The Closing Epitaph

At the end of The Shadow Exploded, the narrator proposes that a few lines from another Bob Dylan song might serve as Carrie’s epitaph. The selected passage speaks of a plain melody that could save a woman from going insane, ease her, cool her, and end the pain of her knowledge. Its language of attempted consolation is set against the devastation of Carrie’s story: the imagined song offers care and relief, but arrives as a memorial rather than an intervention.

Attribution and Function

The closing material explicitly credits the lyrics to Tombstone Blues and names Bob Dylan, identifying the song as the source of the epitaph. This placement gives the reference a structural function as well as a musical one: the book ends by turning from its account of catastrophe to borrowed lyrics that try to speak for Carrie’s pain. The epitaph does not resolve that suffering; it leaves the reader with the distance between the wish to save her and the irreversible outcome.