In a sense, it is time for the father to die when the son is mature enough to make his own moral decisions for the new generation. He never doubts his father’s love for him, however, and continues to love and trust his father, even while he begins to have more and more serious reservations about his father’s choices. He begins to question his father's honesty on such matters as whether or not they are truly the "good guys" and asserts his own opinion when believing that they should help other people. However, as he gains new experiences, the boy learns to use his own judgment and can assess somewhat better whether or not his father is telling the truth. At the beginning of the novel, the boy looks to the father for knowledge and guidance, believing his father to speak the truth unequivocally. The boy matures over the course of this journey, and his changing relationship with his father reflects this growing maturity. How does the boy's relationship with his father change over the course of their journey? Yet, a central conflict in the novel is between the boy’s idea of what good guys do, on the one hand, and what the father does, on the other hand, in being so afraid of others that he refuses to help them, and in more severely punishing others than the boy thinks is necessary. In contrast, the "bad guys" are willing to hurt, use, or murder others for their own benefit. They only scavenge for food and supplies, but they try not to steal from others, and they punish those who steal from them. The man and the boy consider themselves good guys, which they tend to see as seeking survival without harming others.
How do the protagonists distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys"? Are the protagonists indeed the "good guys"? The fire represents internal human strength in the form of qualities such as hope, perseverance and resilience, as well as morality, the ability to retain one's humanity in the face of ultimate destruction and evil. That the man and the boy internally "carry the fire" signifies that they are the "good guys." Upon his deathbed, the man assures the boy that the fire can be found within the boy. What is the significance of "the fire" to the man and the boy? The man and the boy, however, choose to scavenge and refrain from harming others unless violence is absolutely necessary to their survival.
For them, humanity, kindness, and empathy are greatly diminished, it seems, although many of them continue to live in groups. Scavengers on the road choose to resort to murder, thievery, and cannibalism in order to survive. The man's wife responds to the catastrophic circumstances by committing suicide and avoiding whatever gruesome fate might befall her. To the contrary, the father considers death an abhorrent threat that would prevent him from protecting his son his commitment to life drives him on the journey south to ensure his son's survival.ĭiscuss at least two contrasting ways in which the survivors of the catastrophe deal with the chaos. The wife considers death to be a needed relief from these threats. How do the man and the man's wife differ in their conceptions of death?īoth the man and his wife understand that in this post-apocalyptic environment, they are likely to be brutalized at the hands of rapists, murderers, and cannibals. The result is optimistic resilience, a hope against hope, which offers humans an existential choice about how they want to live, whether or not human nature and physical nature make those choices easy or hard. The boy's rescue by a family of "good guys" might be read as an ironic ending with hope in the face of disaster, where somehow the good-guy fire persists. The striking last paragraph, with its vivid imagery of trout hidden in deep mountain glens, offers a redemptive ending to what has been a story of awful indifference and destruction, where hope has eked out a meager, slight existence in the face of the ubiquitous destructiveness of human nature, which has both caused the catastrophe and perpetuated the evils in the world afterward. Overall, does The Road put forth a positive and uplifting view of humanity, or one of darkness and pessimism? He also works hard to reassure his son that they are good people who hold the fire of goodness within them, and that they would never do things like eat other humans. In less dramatic examples, the man continually sacrifices his own health to give his son nourishment. The most obvious example of this occurs when the man does not hesitate to shoot the attacker who holds a knife to the boy's throat. The man demonstrates consistently that he is prepared to take whatever action necessary, even if violent, to ensure his son's survival and best interests.
How does the man demonstrate his love for his son in The Road?
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