After reading my entry from last week (technically as I’m posting this, it was this week), readers will be glad to know that I have few complaints, if any, about the last half of the book. If anything, I was much more emotional, so to speak, in this half. The boy and his father pulled at my heartstrings more than I care to admit. To be fair, it was mostly the boy – his thoughts, his actions, his good-natured soul that got to me, while perhaps just a few of the father’s moments, so to speak, affected me. Those moments will make up a significant portion of my entry today, inasmuch as I can find the highlighted/underlined portions of my book. I do recall marking off several parts, so what the reader will find is that I’ve selected portions of the text that have stood out to me, and talked about them here in chronological order. For some, I have no idea why they stood out – I didn’t at the time I read the novel, and still don’t know as I’m writing this now (though if I discover a meaning while I’m writing, I will certainly add that in).
The first of these moments is on page 159, where the father is surprised with the information that the little boy has thrown out the flute given to him by his father; a flute that the father had taken time to conceive of and craft for his son – to stave off boredom, to keep his brain moving, etc – something the father had put significant amounts of effort and thought into (they don’t say this in the book; I’m just assuming it to be true and I feel I have the right to make such an assumption, given the nature of such a creation). My quote, written alongside the text there: “Why? Little jerk! Abandonment? Comfort?” I feel like the first two parts there are self-explanatory. Obviously I’d like to know why he threw away the flute – what reason could he possibly have? The last two items – the questions – are my thoughts on possible explanations. Perhaps he threw it away because he felt some sort of abandonment from his father, or thought that he might be abandoned in the future (something the father had promised not to do, but was ultimately unable to deliver – I’m reminded of the line from Evita where the narrator says to Evita’s spirit, about the people of her country, “all they wanted was for you to be immortal, but in the end you could not deliver.”). Alternatively, perhaps he threw away the flute for comfort, though I’m not entirely sure why that should be the case.
Perhaps the most memorable character for me in the second half of the book was the old man that the boy and his father encountered on pages 161 – 173. I honestly have no explanation for why he fascinated me so much. I suppose it had something to do with questions in the back of my mind – questions that arose in reaction to this man. Who is he? What does he want? What does he represent, either in the plot or the wider context of the world, or both, or neither? Why does the boy feel such empathy towards him? (The boy’s empathy is a point that I’d like to bring up in a moment.) When he won’t respond to the boy’s and the man’s calling, the boy speculates that “maybe he thinks we’re not real.” But then, what are they, if not real? It seems as if the man has been alone on the road for too long for the world to make any logical sense to him. But then, logical according to who? In this case, me – but who is to say that this man’s world isn’t logical in his own respect? That there isn’t some new form of logic that has come to exist in this man’s individual post-apocalyptic world? A second intriguing moment with this man comes when he asks what he has to do in return for food and a bit of help from the man and the boy. The man simply wants the old man to tell them “where the world went” (166). This brief slip allows us entrance into the man’s mind, and we are now allowed to see that he is asking the same questions that we as readers are asking, even though he lived through whatever it is that has happened. Of course, while there are other moments with the old man, these are the ones that have stuck out the most in my mind.
On page 204, the man finds a coin in the ashy, dusty remains of the town they’ve begun to explore, and wants to show it to his son, perhaps to even give it to his son to keep. However, he thinks a little more and drops the coin, not even calling out to get his son’s attention. I want to know why. Is it simply that he didn’t want to have to explain what it was? I don’t think this is the case, as the father had been perfectly happy to discuss such things with the son throughout the rest of the novel. So, why? Would it make the son too sad to think about things like that? Was the coin too ancient to be worth mentioning? Why, my friends, did the father decide not to show the coin to his son?
On page 210, a statement is made saying that certain people “are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.” My question was simply this: Which mark – beast, or believer? Which mark would these men have? I believe we’re meant to see them as believers, given their morals and their mental state and their actions. But then, who would turn away from them if they do not have the mark of the beast, if they don’t let this post-apocalyptic world consume them?
On pages 214 – 215 (the last sentence on 214), we find the father and son approaching the sea day by day, hoping to find who knows what (it seems as if even the man and his son didn’t know; the son had no reason to know, but the father may have hoped). The boy sits with pieces of the map on his knees, tracing their daily progress. Why was he doing so? He seems to me to have been holding on – to have been trying to hold onto his dad’s world – a world he never knew – both for his father’s sake and for his own, in that his hopes were rising with each day’s progress that the sea might mean a different future – something the boy had never known (though one might hope that the events after the novel’s end would lead the boy to a different, better life somewhere).
On page 218 the boy runs naked into the sea. Perhaps he had a latent desire for a baptism of sorts, though he would not have known it as such. Or he’s simply a child who has seen the sea for the first time and cannot resist its temptations.
On the next page, we find the man wondering if there is another man and his boy on a similar shore in a similar situation on the other side of the sea they’d reached. This feeling of loneliness but hope for someone to be out there – if not to be company, than to feel empathy for them – stood out to me, though again, I’m not entirely sure why.
Of course, the hope that there might somehow be life in the sea is dashed to pieces on page 221 when the father notices that there is no “sea smell” to the sea. That smell is something that you can only get on a seashore, where tiny, microscopic little sea creatures have washed upon the shore, dead. That’s not all there is to it, though – almost any animal that’s associated with the sea or the shore can wash up there, or at least contribute to the smell. The absence of that smell means that nothing has died for quite some time in that sea. Such is impossible if there are or have been living things in that sea recently, so one can see that the sea has been devoid of life for a very significantly long period of time.
I also wonder why the father left the sextant he found on page 228 – why he didn’t take it. Is it that it belonged to someone else? I would say no to that because he’d taken things that had once belonged to other people previously. Is it that it touched him in too personal a way for him to feel comfortable taking it? Was it of no use to him, being on the road and not on the sea? Did he have too much “respect” (or something like that – perhaps admiration) for it to take it as his own?
Page 248 – “I will not send you into the darkness alone.” Does this mean that he won’t let his son die without dying himself? That he won’t die unless his son is safe? That neither of them will die? While the first two may not have been what exactly the father meant, those are the two that came to fruition and that somehow the father was able to keep. Did he know that the other man would find the boy, that that man had tracked the two of them for some time? Did that allow the father to feel comfortable in dying?
The differences between the boy’s reaction and his father’s to the thief on pages 255/256 show their different mental states – the boy wants to forgive him, to save him, even, while the father wants to humiliate the man, to truly make him pay. While the father forces his will to come to fruition first, eventually the boy’s will prevails and they return the man’s clothing to the road, where they hope he will find it. The boy seems to begin to take on a savior personality, so to speak – something particularly noticeable on page 259, where the boy responds that “Yes… [he] is the one” who has to worry about everything. There are multiple meanings to this, the two main ones being: 1, he has to worry about his father and continuing on after his father’s death (which the child surely must be sensing is coming), and 2, perhaps he sees himself as a future savior of the world. Indeed, his story almost parallels a Christ-figure: his earthly father takes care of him, raises him in the world, but then he dies and the child is forced to take care of the father’s remains; then the child is found by another father-figure, and taken into a God-fearing family, and perhaps he will grow up to be a savior. Or, if you prefer a more secular example, perhaps he’ll grow up to be John Connor.
This theory is furthered on page 277, when we are told that the father sees a light around the boy, and when the boy moves, the light moves with him. The father goes on to say “there is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.”
Finally, on page 286 the boy is glad to talk about God with his adopted mother figure, but he finds it easier to talk to his father than to talk to God – a mindset that I can completely understand – though his relationship with God has grown beyond what was already there.
***
So, all in all, this book was excellent and I have been recommending it to friends. It’s not the style I would have chosen to write in, but it’s a wonderful story. Still, though, I’d like to know what it was that had happened – which apocalypse came to be?
