The Road is one of the most depressing books I have ever began to read. Hope only lives in the father, who hopes of reaching the coast and a warmer climate where he can show his son the world he knew before the sky opened up and burned the world down to cold and ash. The father and son walk the road among other survivors, most of who have turned to cannibalism in order to survive. The unnamed father and son survive on food they scavenge from houses long ago abandoned, and when they have run out of everything, on dirty snow. They walk afraid of being caught by the blood cults that capture survivors for food. They carry a pistol with two bullets. If the time comes, and being captured is certain, the boy knows that one of the bullets is meant for him. At one point they are attacked and only one bullet is left and for a moment the third person narrator takes a backseat and the father speaks his fear that the boy will take the pistol and shoot himself, but the pistol won’t work, “Could you crush that beloved skull with a rock?” he wonders.(114) It is very for the child to die by his hand than to suffer an end knowing he will be eaten by fellow humans.
They are the good guys; the only hope that walks this lonely road on a desolate and barren world. The father hopes to show his son what his world once was, and the closest he comes to is feeding him canned pears and peaches, some spaghetti sauce, non-perishable foods that they find in a bomb shelter that another family did not get to use. The boy in this instant decides that they must thank God along with the people that build that place for this food. It is not certain whether he has said grace before, but the boy thanks God for food while the father has, long ago, stopped believing that there is a god caring for them. For the father, the only thing that keeps him alive is his son, his purpose in this horrible world is to protect him, to keep him alive. The boy is pure and honest, he cares for other fellow creatures as seen in his concern for a small boy he sees on of their walks through burned villages. He wants the company of others, and they both fear adults, but the boy does not fear other children. When they find a room containing captured survivors being kept for food, they flee in order to save their lives, all the boy wants to know that they couldn’t help him because otherwise they too would die. He needs to be reassured that they are the good guys, that they must survive because if they die, then the last bit of good left in their world would die, they carry the fire. The boy is a figure of good versus evil, and the father is there to make sure that good prevails against evil. The believe in a god is dying with in the father, but the boy keeps god alive by bring him to their dinner table at the bomb shelter. He carries the torch of a high power than the cannibals that hunt them.
I have not finished the book yet, but I hope that good prevails against the evil in this book. I hope that the do not die under the hands of others. If they must die, I hope they do not die in a moment of fear and terror after trying to survive for so long. I hope the road leads them somewhere better where they can find others like themselves.
