A large bureaucracy in the kingdom is dedicated to efficiently meeting the dragon's demands, shipping people to the foot of the mountain by railway every night.

Seeing the personal tragedy of the young man—who is revealed to be the same boy who cried out at the meeting twelve years earlier—makes the king realize how many lives could have been spared had the kingdom started the dragon-killing project earlier.

The story ends optimistically, with the king remarking to his advisors that, though there are many new challenges that the kingdom will face now that thousands of people are not being devoured by the dragon every day, they have vanquished a great evil.

[3] The fable thus addresses the themes of death acceptance and resignation to fate in the face of ageing and critiques the pro-aging trance.

The story's chief morality advisor is the allegorical equivalent of a bioethicist, and Bostrom notes that many of the morality advisor's arguments about human dignity, the finitude of life, and death being an intrinsic part of the human experience are "lifted, mostly verbatim" from modern bioethicists arguing against research into life extension and the reversal of ageing.

[5] It has been translated into multiple languages, including Chinese, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian and Spanish.