Ambiguous ending

This is how I see it:

So basically the group was addicted to morphine.
In his last words he says: The irony is perfect! The irony consists in that he tried reeeeealy hard to get straight, but at the end everyone (the priest, his wife, the kid dealer, and at the end the police, doctors, etc) united forces to make him go back to morphine: In "the biggest farmacy in town", they will give him morphine to kill his pain from the gunshot.

The way I understand this idea that he "re-paid his debt to the hat" is this: To get into a hospital was his biggest dream ever. So after these sacrifices (the dead girl, him trying to go straight, etc), the hat (which is a kind of symbol of evil) got satisfied and gave him grren light to proceed. Now that the evil forces (hat) were out of the way, he could at last go and find his "holy grail": a hospital.

But there was nobody in the back of the ambulance with him (at least not that we can see), so how would they know en route if he had died or not?

Thanks for the eye opener..I wasn't sure at all if he died in the end as he is narrating, I thought it is something up to the audience to decide on what his fate is in the end..

I think I am pretty convinced he is dead now, thanks again..

Not really. The last line says 'hope they can keep me alive'.

And it ends on a happy note since he's happy to finally be admitted to a hospital where he's going to get a morphine fix all day and night... as long as he stays alive.

He is dead. Listen to the commentary with Gus Van Sant and Dillan. Van Sant clearly states that he was supposed to die and that they were not ever intending on doing it like a flashback origionaly. They said that they just liked the shot, and so they kept with it in the end. But he dies from the gunshot, his telling the cop at the end about the hat and to warn Nadine, because he was so afraid of the hex that it finally caught him, and that she needed to run like hell, to run faster and farther away then he did. That it was too late for him, and it is ironic because they are sending him back to the biggest of the exact places where he was robbing from. So in essence he thought the hex was putting its final chokehold on him and sending him right back to hell.

i don't think ne one mentioned on here that in the book the last line is bob hughes was dead on arrival at the hospital... so i can't remember if he was dead in the movie or not but it seemed to me like they made it out to be that he was going to be ok? but it would make more sense if he died cuz that stays true to the book. also in the book dianne doesn't hook up with rick it's some other guy named bill but, rick runs their gang...

I never thought he died either, mostly because James Fogle didn't.
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I'm pretty sure the character Bob was based on a junkie that Fogle knew.

Not Fogle himself

Agreed.

Poorly Lived and Poorly Died, Poorly Buried and No One Cried

That's what I thought.
He narrates everything, almost like he's reading from a journal.
He can't "narrate" his own death.
I think he lives, but since he paid his debt to the hat (by coming close to death), going back on drugs may be OK in his mind.
"They're taking me to the fattest pharmacy in town."
I'd think that if he died, there would be no such statement.
But, I'll take Van Sant at his word if he meant for Bob to have died.
I have the same problem with Kevin Spacey's "voice-over" after being shot it the head in American Beauty.
No doubt HE was dead.

correct--i also just rewatched the ending. The siren and lights stayed on all the way. He was conscious all the way. He may have died in the book, but in the movie, he was alive at the end.

Period.

'''''A leftist against mass immigration & multiculturalism.

I never understood who "they" were in his last line "I was still alive. I hope they can keep me alive.". Was he talking about the people who were helping him kick his addiction or was "they" a reference to drugs, which he chose to come back to. Because he also mentions that "he paid his debt to the hat" and perhaps interpreted that the shot he got was the sentence which if he survived he was free to go back to a drug lifestyle.