The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Dissident Heart · Posted: Sat Apr 07, 2007 10:32 am Post subject: The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Today starts our discussion of McCarthy's sublime narrative describing the terrible journey of a father and son along a nameless road showered by the gray ash of nuclear winter. Some of the discussion has already begun in another thread.

I think a key insight into the narrative involved the conversation between the mother and father when the mother decided that suicide was the only way out. Rather than face the inevitable violations delivered by ruthless hordes...better to die now than suffer the agony and humiliation of witnessing your loved ones tortured...or eaten, as the story eventually discloses.

What is is that keeps the father (nameless, like the son) bound to continue along the road, knowing the dangerous risks surrounding them? Why not use the remaining bullets and end the perpetual anxiety, restlessness, fear and dread?

Edited by: Chris OConnor at: 4/12/07 1:21 pm

irishrosem · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2007 6:17 pm Post subject: Re: The Road

Sorry for not contributing on Saturday as scheduled. I was away and didn’t have the internet access I thought I would.

D.H., I also considered, throughout the book, what drove the characters to continue. Perhaps because a member here had mentioned Elie Wiesel’s Night a couple weeks before I read The Road, Wiesel’s story was constantly on my mind. As I recall in Night, Wiesel is explicit that the only reason he didn’t choose to lay on the cold ground and give up (die) was because he knew his father would do the same. As a child, Wiesel pushed on in an effort to save his father. I also think I remember Wiesel saying he assumed the same of his father—that the only reason his father fought to survive was so that Wiesel would too. The similarities ring true for me in The Road. Right from the outset the physical survival of the father and son appear to be two sides of the same coin, one could not survive without the other. “What would you do if I died?/ If you died I would want to die too./ So you could be with me?/ Yes. So I could be with you./ Okay” (p 9). It is evident that if the father died the child would not physically survive. And despite the father’s urging to his son that they remain positive, it also seems evident—through the man’s nostalgic wanderings and dreams of his wife “In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy” (p 15)—that the father would not struggle to survive if it weren’t for the child. The man knows that, regardless of his capability to survive physically in this world, “the boy was all that stood between him and death” (p 25). They are, quite literally, “each the other’s world entire” (p 5).

“He knew only that the child was his warrant” (p 4). A warrant serves as an authorization or justification for an act or a belief. Does the child serve as a warrant to justify the man’s actions? Does he serve as a warrant for the man’s continued existence in future generations—passing of genetic lore? Does the child serve as a warrant for the man’s continued belief in a God who is, as we have already learned, silent? In the context of survival, the child serves as a warrant to the man’s life, his physical survival, in this, thus far, bleak wasteland. Without the child as his warrant, the man would surely perish, for he would no longer struggle to survive. I asked when I read Night, and I ask again, does this familial love surpass the natural instinct for physical survival? Does McCarthy hint at/state this?

Also to consider, the survival theme seems to only come into play when the characters are really struggling. When food is available, when their cart is full, the characters seem much less likely to consider death. So it isn’t necessarily the barren land, the lack of human contact, the lack of society, the death of their wife/mother that drives them to contemplate suicide—or even just giving up—it is inevitably food that inspires that question.

This is a huge offshoot, but since I used the quote above, I figured I would bring it up now. The text tells us that the man and the boy are “each the other’s world entire.” This phrasing and the idea behind the quote immediately struck me. This is a significant topic in gender studies, particularly women’s studies. For almost two generations now, a portion of gender scholarship has focused on women living entirely for others, specifically their children. It is also an interesting recurring theme in literature (most notably Virginia Wolf, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton—those are my favorites anyway). Seeing this topic associated with a father/son relationship, specifically a father/son relationship that exists because the mother committed suicide is extremely interesting. I think it can also deepen the discussion regarding the mother, and her choice to die rather than work to save her child. (I’m curious to know how long she held out after the birth; I don’t think this is explicit in the text. If I missed this, can someone direct me to it.)

I have more but I’m out of time for now.

So where's everyone else? Mad? Niall? Mr. P.? That's right I have no qualms calling people out by name, if ncessary.

Edited by: irishrosem at: 4/9/07 7:23 pm

Dissident Heart · Posted: Mon Apr 09, 2007 9:46 pm Post subject: Re: The Road

“What would you do if I died?/ If you died I would want to die too./ So you could be with me?/ Yes. So I could be with you./ Okay” (9)

Great quotation to start the conversation irishrose. I wonder if the father is honest in his answer though. For the boy, dying doesn't seem to be the end, in that he expects that if his father dies along with him...they will still be together. For the father, death will be the end: rest and discharge from his impossible warrant. This might be a bit too narrow a definition of death for both of the characters, and considering how death is so prominent in this story, we might spend some time exploring what death means to both.

The honesty/dishonesty of the father in relation to the boy's many questions is also something worth exploring I think.

I think your Wiesel connection is spot-on, and I was often reminded of many concentration camp survivor narratives while reading the Road. Especially the raining ash. The difference between the two is that one holocaust involved the incinerated bodies of millions, whereas another involved the burining of an entire biosphere.

There is another connection to the Holocaust that I want to make. It comes from Roger Gottlieb's A Spirituality of Resistance: Finding a Peaceful Heart and Protecting the Earth Gottlieb explores the diaries and letters of Polish Jews who led an impossible resistance against the German forces outside of Krakow. Gottlieb describes how these intrepid men and women found the courage and wherewithal to fight back and lead the most successful Jewish resistance in the second world war. It was hopeless and doomed from the start. These men and women knew this- they were neither utopians nor optimistic. But they described how in the act of resistance they never felt more alive or had their lives ever been so full of meaning and purpose. Fighting the good fight against impossible odds filled them with a passion and courage they did not know existed.

I wonder how much of the Father's warrant is a matter of resistance, in the sense that Gottlieb describes those Jewish freedom fighters?

By the way, Gottlieb's Spirituality of Resistance charges humanity of the 20th and 21st centuries with a kind of silent genocide waged against the entire planet...he explores the lives of two Nazi middle management characters and shows how they justified, rationalized, minimized and were in blatant denial of their crimes in many of the same ways we abuse our fragile biosphere.

irishrosem · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 1:21 am Post subject: Re: The Road

D.H., it’s interesting that you mention holocaust victims with regard to the falling ash imagery. It made me realize that I had a distinct image in my head when I read McCarthy’s description, but I never even thought to pinpoint where that image came from in my memory. Thinking about it now, I imagine it is probably from movies about the holocaust. In fact, I even pictured holocaust survivors when McCarthy described the gaunt people that haunt this novel, but never associated the ash.

To draw this into the text, I paid particular attention to this description of the boy: “His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian” (9). For some reason this line struck me almost as a nod to film through theater. In a world that has regressed to pre-industrialization, even metaphors have assumed an old-world reference. So instead of the typical response during disasters, “it was like a movie,” McCarthy compares the image of the boy to the more antiquated stage, specifically the Greek stage with the use of thespian. This reminded me of Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others where she describes how, after generations of being fed images of suffering—namely war—we have associated the reality of pain with photography. Sontag writes, “The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images” (21). So after 9/11, or Hurricane Katrina victims’ statements included the now familiar “it was unreal, like a movie” mantra. Sontag notes that after years of “big-budget Hollywood disaster films, ‘It felt like a move’ seems to have displaced the way survivors of a catastrophe used to express the short-term unassimilability of what they had gone through; ‘It felt like a dream’” (22). So by witnessing disasters like those that seem to have assailed the states for a couple years, including the U.S. involvement in Iraq, do we become voyeurs to other people’s pain just by watching the news?

Though the above may seem off topic, the text itself is replete with images that would make great movie scenes. The father and son descending into the basement to find the captors to be cannibalized. The falling ash that D.H. has mentioned. The long empty stretches of wasteland juxtaposed with the vestiges of once thriving towns and cities. The skeletal remains of plant life that fall to dust when disturbed. The gaunt humans that wander the earth in constant search of food. The disinterested sun that never reveals itself. The abandoned, shipwrecked boat. So I guess my question is what is the point of dystopian literature? Are we meant to be witnesses to predictions of inevitable outcomes? Or are we meant to be challenged to prevent such outcomes? If the latter, then why does the book end on an up note? Fish swimming in a cool water, the boy’s new family living in a land that seems to be at both the beginning and end of time. The father lives just long enough to assure his son’s future. And the boy finally with a group, what the reader can only assume are the “good guys” he longed to find, and other children.

These are just some wandering thoughts; I’m sorry if they are confusing. I, unfortunately, don’t have my book in front of me to quote and have yet to fully flesh out the most significant theme for me. I’m hoping to get around to that tomorrow. But I figured since I had typed out the above, I’d post it.

MadArchitect · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 1:30 am Post subject: Re: The Road

Nice, light reading, huh? In my notes I described it as, "if Camus wrote a Mad Max film and Hemingway translated it into English...."

If you haven't read the novel yet, be forewarned -- I'm not going to shy away from spoilers.

Two potential trajectories from my notes and then I'll address some of the comments you two have already made.

1) The gun is a means of escape from Hell -- where "Hell is other people" (I'm sure I don't need to tell you that's an Oscar Wilde quote, but I'll mention it just so you don't think that I think it's from "The Road"). In this case, Hell is usually a distorted reflection of the way the world was prior to the apocalypse. The militias, the cannibals, the pirates and the bandits that the protagonists encounter along the way have all managed survival by adapting predatory strategies out of the raw material of the culture that lies in ruins around them. That's an observation that you can more or less apply to any of the less literary post-apocalyptic stories out there (like "Mad Max"), but it also points to the moral dilemma that increasingly takes center stage as the conflict of the story. Because the "good guys" in this case aren't particularly altruistic or charitable; the son tries to be, but is kept in check by the father, who demands a kind of humane ambivalence. And in the later scenes of the novel, that struggle comes to a head, as the father attempts to apply a makeshift eye-for-an-eye rule, while the son increasingly laments their unwillingness to take a chance on others. And this is getting way ahead of ourselves, in all likelihood, but I'd even go so far as to suggest that the father's death releases the child from that protective ambivalence and allows him to risk everything in order to trust a stranger.

2) The road of the title is probably a more versatile and multi-faceted emblem than I can grasp at the moment, but I'd like to suggest that it serves in part as a metaphor for the trajectory of civilization; that is, for Progress, inexorable and doomed. Particularly salient to me is the passage on p. 161, where the father and son pass through a burned over stretch of road, littered with burned traffic and bodies. "Why didn't they leave the road? / They couldn't. Everything was on fire." There's a self-destructive component to this trajectory (which persists in the "bad guys"), even as there's the utopian component that imagines a temperate beach and the promise of easy survival at the end.

Now, for your comments:
irishrosem: Right from the outset the physical survival of the father and son appear to be two sides of the same coin, one could not survive without the other.

In terms of the brute physical strain of survival, I don't know that the share was even. There are several instances in which the son proves to be a liability. The boy obviously wouldn't be able to survive without some help, but the father would probably have fared better without the extra mouth to feed.

At the same time, it's obvious that he wouldn't have the will to survive without the possibility of his son living on after him. And what struck me in the book is that part of the way the father justifies going on -- even when it would be easier and perhaps more humane to opt out, once and for all -- is that he hopes to pass on to the son some sense of civilization as he knew it. They talk repeatedly about "carrying the fire", and one passage in particular struck me as relevant to the whole thing. The man has had a dream involving strange, silent creatures: "He thought perhaps they'd come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own." (p. 130; American hardback edition) That strikes me as a potentially fatal moment, but they press on anyway.

For me, the idea that recurred most often, and was most salient, even if it was never made explicit, was that of culture death. The father and son are picking together through the ruins of a world that can never be as real to the son as it is to the father, and the boy realizes, probably more acutely than the father, how much of the burden he must carry alone in ensuring that some measure of the achievements of civilization survive their ordeal. Another exchange that struck me was this: "You're not the one who has to worry about everything. / ... / He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes, I am, he said. I am the one." (p. 219) The man has the luxury of concentrating his worry on the boy's survival. The boy has to worry about the state of the world he stands to inherit.

And it's a broken world, one so broken that he may not have anything to show for his efforts, no matter how hard he tries.

And despite the father’s urging to his son that they remain positive, it also seems evident—through the man’s nostalgic wanderings and dreams of his wife “In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy” (p 15)—that the father would not struggle to survive if it weren’t for the child.

That wife -- she's barely a character at all, and you could probably do a lot with the question of what her feminine identity entails. For my part, she reminds me of the shrouded figure from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", the embodiment of death as an appealing alternative to the burden of life.

They are, quite literally, “each the other’s world entire” (p 5).

And that world is built on expectation. There's a passage that suggests as much, though subtly. I didn't think to write it down, but the gist is that the man is looking at a book case full of crumbling books, and realizes that their appeal lay in the expectation of some fulfillment. With the rest of the world gone, that expectation was annihilated, and he felt no need to bother rescuing the books. For their parts, the man expects his child to carry on "the fire", and the boy expects the father to kindle that fire in him.

The text tells us that the man and the boy are “each the other’s world entire.” This phrasing and the idea behind the quote immediately struck me.

The phrasing may recall the Talmudic saying that, "he who saves one life saves the world entire." Just thought I'd throw that in there.

One resonance, I suppose, could be the observation that you can't really have a civilization without at least two participants. If by "the world entire" we mean civilization (in a very broad sense), then you could take both phases pretty literally. Particularly when your civilization really is made up of just two people.

Dissident Heart: I wonder if the father is honest in his answer though.

This is just personal interpretation, but I think that one concern in the back of the father's mind might have been that, without the son, he'd have fallen into the same behavior as those around him -- the total abandonment of prior moral norms. And it seems entirely possible with me that, as a matter of personal character, he might have chosen suicide rather than risk turning immoral.

But that's pretty speculative, and I'd say it's textually more sound to say that the father felt a strong pull towards death as a form of reunion with his lost wife, and probably would have felt that pull more strongly if it had been compounded by the loss of his son as well.

I was often reminded of many concentration camp survivor narratives while reading the Road.

Heh. I was reminded of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". "The Road" could almost be seen as a photo-negative response to that book.

Another photo-negative: while reading "The Road", I was also reading John Reader's "Africa: A Biography of the Continent", the first 4th of which deals with the geographic development of the continent and the evolution of humanity right up 'til the advent of human culture. So quite by accident I managed to get a stereo-optic view of the build up, and eventual demise, of human civilization. Needless to say, "Africa" will probably color some of my comments concerning "The Road". Fair warning.

And another book I was (re-)reading at the time: "The Witch-Crazes of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries", which, of course, presents its own kind of holocaust. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I suppose the "bad guys" in "The Road" could be compared to the predatory witch-masters of Trevor-Roper's historical study.

MadArchitect · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 1:46 am Post subject: Re: The Road

irishrosem: So by witnessing disasters like those that seem to have assailed the states for a couple years, including the U.S. involvement in Iraq, do we become voyeurs to other people’s pain just by watching the news?

I think "watching the news" is the operative term here. Because what gets classified as news by televised news programs -- especially 24 hour network news -- is determined in large part by whether or not there's footage available. And the way in which footage presents information, versus the way in which information about the same topic may be presented verbally, does a lot to determine which stories are publicized by television. Producers look for stories that can be built around an image; and they look for ways to maximize the image, to make the story more appealing by relying on the strengths of the image. Which means that the very format of television news encourages the presentation of news as spectacle. Look at any given hour of CNN or FoxNews, and you'll see what I mean. It's hard to connect 90% of the stories to your actual life -- what does this particular event mean for me, or for the world at large -- but it's easy to see the invitation to emotional catharsis or morbid curiosity.

Though the above may seem off topic, the text itself is replete with images that would make great movie scenes.

Yeah, but who could do it without making it exploitative or cliche? Maybe if Terrence Malick signed on...

So I guess my question is what is the point of dystopian literature?

I'm not sure I see this as belonging primarily to the dystopian tradition. There's certainly a dystopian element, but ultimately I think this book is more devoted to the personal relationship than a book like, say, "1984" or "Brave New World" or even "Utopia". One thing I think you can take away from it is the observation that the father is so intent on protecting his son that he damn well almost dooms him. But I don't think that's presented as a social prognosis, and it would be too constraining to reduce the entire book to just that point.

Dissident Heart · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 4:20 pm Post subject: Re: The Road

irishrose: “His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian” (9). For some reason this line struck me almost as a nod to film through theater.

Your mention of this reminded me of the scene in the film Baraka where the Japanese Butoh dancers distort their painted white faces with exaggerated grimaces and screams...from downturned docility to wrenching terror. A few scenes later (after images of the burning oil fields of Kuwait and the bombed out, rusted vehicles along the "highway of death" where US fighter jets decimated fleeing Iraqis post Desert Storm) we see the faces of adolescent twin girls in Auschwitz and the portraits of many of the tortured in the death camps of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.

Actually, I decided to google Highway of Death, Iraq and found this and considered how this road might resemble the Road of our narrative. It reminds me of the scene that Mad highlights "Why didn't they leave the road? / They couldn't. Everything was on fire."

irishrose: So I guess my question is what is the point of dystopian literature? Are we meant to be witnesses to predictions of inevitable outcomes? Or are we meant to be challenged to prevent such outcomes? If the latter, then why does the book end on an up note?

If it is inevitable, why bother? Perhaps the author is truly a misanthrop and simply wants to throw fuel on an already dangerous fire. Perhaps the narrative becomes something of a Medusa's Stare: turning the reader to stone...disabling, disempowering, demoralizing? Maybe the author sees the story as an important part of a larger plan: discouraging some readers, devastating others, and perhaps enticing a small few to lead the way in dismantling the social order? Dystopian literature as revolutionary fiction: a violent manifesto against the status quo...pushing the faint hearted and optimistic into despair, while inspiring a few restless martyrs to risk everything for a greater cause?

Does The Road end on an up note? The man and woman that embrace the boy upon the death of the father seems better than him freezing to death while starving next to his father's corpse. His desire for human interaction is certainly given new hope: but at what cost? So he survives to live another day, but what quality of life? Is life always better than death?

MA: And in the later scenes of the novel, that struggle comes to a head, as the father attempts to apply a makeshift eye-for-an-eye rule, while the son increasingly laments their unwillingness to take a chance on others.

I think the moral dillemma and struggle is: what is the point of living if you can't be, won't be good? Their drive to survive is fueled by the improvised mythos of "carrying of the fire"...the fire is a fragile worth that lifts them above the cannibals and ruthless violators...it is the spark of humanity that will not abandon what is good, no matter how expedient or life preserving; and what is good is that humans care for one another and will sacrifice for the welfare of another. The struggle is: if I don't violate the violators before they violate me, then I abandon my own welfare and can be no good to anyone. Well, at least it's one way to look at it. I'm sure it can go many directions.

MA: The man has the luxury of concentrating his worry on the boy's survival. The boy has to worry about the state of the world he stands to inherit.

I think the culture death theme is essential to the story, but I'm not sure that the boy is as aware of the dynamic as you say. But, I'm not so sure I can pin down what exactly it is that the boy is worried about. The carrying of the fire ethos may speak to a drive to reconstitute and rebuild a devastated culture. But it may also refer to the moral impulse to do the right thing. Maybe resurrecting a decomposed culture is doing the right thing? I don't see the boy worried about the state of the world he inherits as much as the pain he endures when he sees another suffer: in other words his worry is rooted in compassion, not in the fate of the world- but in the needs of whomever he encounters. Perhaps the keeping the fire is practicing compassion? If not practicing compassion, reminding themselves that they are compassionate, they care, and they love...even if so much around them says otherwise.

MA: I was reminded of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". "The Road" could almost be seen as a photo-negative response to that book.

Good connection. The father is supremely resourceful in the story. We get a hint that he might be a doctor when interrogating the pirate (who's brains required washing from the boy's hair). I found myself again and again in the story feeling profoundly grateful for my shoes, a warm bed, a clean glass of water, a shower or bath, fresh vegetable, shoelaces, music.

Edited by: Dissident Heart at: 4/11/07 5:22 pm

irishrosem · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 4:32 pm Post subject: Re: The Road

D.H.: I found myself again and again in the story feeling profoundly grateful for my shoes, a warm bed, a clean glass of water, a shower or bath, fresh vegetable, shoelaces, music.

BOOKS!

Don't have time right now, but when I read this I thought about how the man turned from the books in the scene Mad mentioned. So I wanted to add books to D.H.'s list.

Dissident Heart · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 5:17 pm Post subject: Re: The Road

irishrose: the mother, and her choice to die rather than work to save her child.

What if saving her child involved modelling, encouraging, thereby giving permission to her child to kill himself? The rescue would involve a release from an impossible burden: surviving in an utterly inhuman environment. The mother's suicide is the work required to save her child in the world described in The Road?

She would not take the risk involved in carrying the fire, if it involved the inevitable horrors she expected for her son. Better the fire go out than he suffer in such terrible ways.

And, of course....BOOKS!

Edited by: Dissident Heart at: 4/11/07 6:17 pm

MadArchitect · Posted: Wed Apr 11, 2007 7:10 pm Post subject: Re: The Road

Dissident Heart: I think the culture death theme is essential to the story, but I'm not sure that the boy is as aware of the dynamic as you say. But, I'm not so sure I can pin down what exactly it is that the boy is worried about. The carrying of the fire ethos may speak to a drive to reconstitute and rebuild a devastated culture. But it may also refer to the moral impulse to do the right thing.

I doubt the two are all that distinct in the boy's mind. For him, the ethos is the core of civilization as he knows it. And I think that the father would probably agree to some extent that everything else that seemed good in the world was premised on that basic kernal of morality -- or something like it. Carrying the fire, in that sense, probably is reducible to the moral impulse, but the novel also gave me the faint impression that the fire also contained the promise of everything else that was associated with culture. I don't think it would be out of place to say that the books, the shoes, the easy meals and the city are, in the terms laid down by the novel, the flowering of that essential spark.

It also occurs to me that we've brought out two scenes that give different valences to the notion of fire. The protagonists are carrying the fire; but the immolated corpses couldn't leave the road because there was fire everywhere. Not to harp on the theme, but that seems to support the idea that the novel presents civilization as a phenomenon with two aspects: one centered on growth; one centered on self-destruction.

What if saving her child involved modelling, encouraging, thereby giving permission to her child to kill himself?

Does the boy know how his mother died? I'm vague on the point, but it seems to me that the father never really filled him in on what happened. I feel like there's probably a passage that hints at whether or not the boy knows, but it doesn't spring to mind offhand.

Dissident Heart · Posted: Thu Apr 12, 2007 9:59 am Post subject: Prometheus

MA: Not to harp on the theme, but that seems to support the idea that the novel presents civilization as a phenomenon with two aspects: one centered on growth; one centered on self-destruction.

Prometheus was the character in Greek myth who stole fire from the gods, gave it to humanity, unleashing the great spark of technology and civilization. Zeus was most perturbed by Prometheus' hubristic foresight, and felt compelled to punish the maker of men and civilization with

Quote:
such evil for them that they shall desire death rather than life, and Prometheus shall see their misery and be powerless to succor them. That shall be his keenest pang among the torments I will heap upon him."

Prometheus was chained to a rock where a giant eagle would eat his liver, only to have it grow back each day and with each day the eagle would return to tear at and devour the titan's flesh.

Edited by: Dissident Heart at: 4/12/07 11:02 am

irishrosem · Posted: Wed Apr 18, 2007 5:31 pm Post subject: Re: the Road

Mad: What's interesting is that the boy carries it so much further than his father.

This is what makes me think it is the latter, Mad; that “it's innate and specific to him.” Also there is no time, without constant pressure from the boy, that the father chooses to act altruistically to anyone but the son. So, though the son can learn from the father that you take care of your own, where does the faith in strangers come from? I think it has to be innate. There is no scene in the book, that I can recall, where the boy learns it.

Though the boy embodies an innate sense of compassion, the father has only his memories. Although the father’s flashbacks never touch on any specific moment where he acted compassionately or received compassion, I think we can assume he experienced these moments. It is this memory of a society that once was that can allow him to die, without killing the boy.

The pivotal scene for me, however, with regard to the father’s faith in finding others, is the underground bunker. I think if the father really had no hope of finding other “good guys,” he would have lived out the rest of their days there. The text hints at safety issues that required them to move on. But the bunker hadn’t been found to that point (years after the incident). The father, ever imaginative and adaptive, could have figured some way to hide the door. They could have kept watch during the day and slept in the bunker at night. Even if there came a point where they were discovered, the father could have easily killed the child and himself then. There was no reason to believe the road was any safer than the bunker. And the bunker itself was laden with supplies. It was that desire to go south, to go and find others that pushed them on. Yes the father’s knowledge of his sickness probably propelled that desire. But if the father really had no faith in finding others, would they have left or would they have lived some nice weeks/months/years out in the bunker and died there?


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