Are We There Yet Dad?

The Road offers to main characters, The Man, and The Boy.  Both Father and son.  McCarthy chooses no unique names because, I believe, he wants us to be able to picture ourselves in their position.  Just like the lack of an explicit setting, he wants the reader to be in the wasteland. 

                The Man is a very mysterious character in a sense that throughout the story he displays incredible characteristics.  We don’t exactly get an immediate clear understanding of his character, but rather learn about him through such scene where he performs his character defining actions.  One such scene where we learn about The Man is shown he is facing off against the stranger and says: “…the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you won’t have them anymore” (64).  Here, in this scene, we learn that The Man is pretty smart and knows a significant amount about the human brain.  Such evidence may point to the fact that he is a possible doctor or someone with medical expertise.  More evidence to support the claim of The Man being a doctor can come from his ability to deliver his son and cut the umbilical cord.  The Man also seems to be very skilled with a gun as well.  “The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and leveled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead” (66).  He makes a maze of their tracks so they can’t be followed.  “They kicked snow over the fire and went on through the trees and circled and came back. They hurried, leaving a maze of tracks and then they set out back north through the woods…” (104).  The Man is a very versatile and smart man.  He acts only to protect his son, and is assigned to this duty by God.  It his “warrant” and he makes the comment: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?” (77).  The Boy is his motivator and hope, without him he most likely would have killed himself.

                The Boy is somewhat young but is not old enough to act independently.  He relies on his father, The Man, to answer every question.  Almost every piece of dialogue is the boy asking a question to his father about either the past, what something is, or if they will die.  Something that struck me as interesting and abnormal was The Boy’s constant questions about if they will die.  For me, I wouldn’t want to just ask if we were gonna die, it’s a little grim and no one really knows if or when they will die.   The Man always responds with “not now” or “no” which is reassuring to The Boy.  Overall, the boy is upfront with his father, telling him if he scared, hungry, cold or anything.  The Boy faces a changing moment when he is attacked by the stranger.  He becomes more silent and almost scared in a sense.  The Man acts to protect him from strangers and the “bad guys” of the wasteland.  But from another perspective, The Man is one of those dangerous strangers; scavenging, killing—however he does not do so gladly—and doing what ever necessary to survive. 

                The two are like the sun and the moon.  They can only survive with each other.  The Man would surly kill himself like he stated “’What would you do if I died?’ ‘If you died I would want to die too’” (11).  If The Man died, The Boy would not survive very long.  He has very little skill when it comes to survival, he’s only a boy.  Both are relatable and are likable, the reader is most likely to see them as just a family trying to survive and not out to kill anyone.  Even in the book, The Man says they are “the good guys”.  We have yet to see if there is a lapse in time and The Boy becomes more independent, or if the story continues once The Man dies due to the wasteland or his life-threatening cough.  That cough seems to constantly stay with him and he’s always worried The Boy might catch it, adding to the idea that The Man might be a threat to The Boy just like any other stranger.