The Ritzy wrote:However, I feel like the fear of becoming food to someone else was hyped up so much that it fell a little flat at the end.

If we do choose to stop and consider that the characters may represents such ideas such as civilization, society, culture or even nations, the theme of people used as a food source makes sense. Countries will use others for their own gain. It wasn’t too long ago when Germany was split up and distributed among other countries. In a way, Germany was eaten by these other countries. Many years of course have past since WWI, but, if this catastrophe which occurs in Road is a global one, powerful nations may try to gobble up as many resources as they can from nations or civilizations or societies which are less equipped.

giselle wrote:We can see them as walking representatives of humanity, stripped of civilization and its protection,

Humanity, yes, I think you really touched upon something here using this word. Humanity does not have borders or boundries. If a global event happens, humanity would need to survive, not just Americans, or Germans, or Italians, or . . .

The young innocent boy, with the hopeful father, humanity? Hmmm? I like it!

Yes, the young innocent boy, the hopeful father and we shouldn't forget the mother, she is critically important to both of them, even in her absence ... together they are the fundamentals of humanity in this desperate world that McCarthy has imagined, humanity in the big sense, without regard to borders or race or other artificial ways of subdividing humanity into lesser groupings.

The ending didn't bother me in the least. The boy does get lucky, but things are not altogether that hopeful...people survive for a time...somewhere there are still fish. Perhaps people can crawl out of the destruction and start the whole cycle anew...but there was something not hopeful about the imagery Mccarthy uses to describe the fish. Something is forever lost.

What I found interesting about the boy and his father, is that their journey's aree different ones. They both agree they "carry the fire." To the father, that fire is everything good and pure... God itself, in the boy. His journey is driven by his desire to keep that torch lit to the very end.

On the other hand, the boy likes the notion of carrying the fire, but throughout the story he is struggling to define what that is. His father has a reason to live, a reason to perservere. The son has a harder time accepting his own life as the driving reason. He begins to question their goodness. If they aren't helping others then they are leaving them to die....if they are struggling just for themselves, then truly, what is the point. If they aren't living by a higher ideal(and not eating people isn't quite enough for him) then what makes them special, what sets them apart with the fire. He begins questioning the truth behind what his father tells him. He tells him he lies a lot.

Perhaps the boy could continue to survive on on his own once his father dies, but what would be the point? Certainly no benefit to him. He has to take a chance. That said, he does get lucky. I think it is an opportunity for Mccarthy to show that there are pockets of humanity left..that as somebody else said, some trust, some faith in aspects of human nature needs to be extended so that it can be built upon...so that civilization can reconstitute.

This is one of the many cases of an author being afraid to just say "... and everybody dies. The End." Sometimes that is the only plausible course. Just do it.
I know editors want it in at a certain page limit, but after all that deep dark harsh reality, don't detract from it with unlikely rainbows and lollipops.

This might not seem relevant to The Road, which I read and saw the film version of, but I'm getting strong signals back to it from Jared Diamond's nonfiction book Collapse. Diamond tells of several societies that collapsed into the kind of depravity and brutality that McCarthy gives us in The Road. I've read so far about Easter Island and a group of three other Polynesian islands. The ultimate cause of the collapses is ecological devastation the societies brought on themselves. This is what we see in CM's book. I think his purpose might have been to show that we cannot maintain our humanity (except perhaps for a few exceptions) without, basically, food--which depends on having an ecosystem. I wondered why McCarthy was so vague about what caused the planet to die. Now I'm thinking he didn't want this to distract from what he was trying to show. It didn't make a difference what caused the the world to be ending.

What happens in The Road isn't confined to single societies, unlike in Diamond's book. But Diamond cautions that with globalization, with interdependence, there is now the potential for planetary collapse to occur, as far off as that prospect might actually be. Diamond is so far from a doomsday alarmist that when he makes a statement like that, I tend to pay attention.