The End

Morrison first wrote the lyrics about the end of his relationship with an ex-girlfriend, Mary Werbelow, and over months of sets at the Whisky a Go Go the song grew far longer. He said in 1969 that it started as a simple goodbye song, probably to a girl, which he could see as a goodbye to a kind of childhood, and added that he really did not know. The spoken section opens with the lines about a killer who awoke before dawn and put his boots on, and it climaxes in an Oedipal exchange with a father and a mother. Morrison had worked on a student production of Oedipus Rex at Florida State University, and Manzarek said he was re-enacting a bit of Greek drama. The Doors were fired from the Whisky on 21 August 1966 after he added an explicit retelling of the Oedipus myth during a performance of it.

The song was recorded live in the studio with no overdubbing. The band tried it on the evening of 15 September 1966 and recorded two more takes the next day. The album version is an edit of two takes, with the splice just before the line about the killer. Krieger used an open guitar tuning he had learned from Ravi Shankar's music lessons at the Kinnara School of Music in Los Angeles, which gives a sitar or veena sound. Berman of Pitchfork noted in 2006 that Morrison puts stream-of-consciousness prose where most bands would put the guitar solo. The Guardian ranked it 12th among the band's songs in 2021, describing nearly 12 minutes of droning funereal organ, tangled guitar and Morrison's fire-and-brimstone incantations.

After the album

Francis Ford Coppola used a remix of it in Apocalypse Now in 1979. Guitar World placed the guitar solo 93rd on its list of the 100 greatest guitar solos. Live versions on official releases include 15:42 from the Hollywood Bowl on 5 July 1968, on In Concert, and 17:46 from New York City on 17 January 1970, on Live in New York. In 2019 Marilyn Manson recorded a cover that was released digitally and then withdrawn. It appears in 98 logged Doors setlists.