It's been a while since I read Green Mile, so I had to go back and look
To me, those pages rounded out the tragedy of Paul's life--not so much the accident, but that he faces in that moment what John passed on to him:
life, in all it's glory
and tragedy. The key sentence, I think, is this:
"John saved me, too, and years later, standing in the pouring Alabama rain and looking for a man who wasn't there in the shadows of an underpass, standing amid the spilled luggage and the ruined dead, I learned a terrible thing: sometimes there's absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation." (my emphasis
). I urge you to read those last pages (and indeed the whole book) again with that in mind. I think it's the crux of the entire story. Mr. King has an uneasy relationship with faith, and an absolute gift for shining a bright light on belief and believers; he wants us to use our
minds, not just our hearts. The mouse dying...yeah. Sympathetic as hell. Sad, proof that Paul will indeed die... but the book wasn't ever about immortality, per se, but about good, evil, and how big or small the divide between them really is. So many of his books have this theme threaded throughout them.
You could lose the last chapter, sure. But them you lose the part of the novel that takes it beyond a miracle story, a heart tugger and tear jerker, and into an examination of the human heart and how our desires can be curses.