A particularly shocking scene occurred when father and son encountered the man that lightning had hit. Somehow our two main characters find themselves forced to do something that would normally go against their ideals because of their own dire situation. This moment is probably a cliché since it has been overused by many apocalyptic stories. In these, the characters find themselves in a position where they have to sacrifice their morals or ideals in order to survive. At some point this might have been a shocker to the reader but now such a scene has lost some of its initial power. Still, this raised the question of why would such an obscure theme become recurring in pop-culture.
At some point this might have intended to deal with the hard decisions people have to take in order to survive under certain extraordinary circumstances. Still, in this book it seems different because the moment when circumstances force them to leave the man on the road, the decision has already been taken. They don’t doubt whether they should leave him or not behind. They continue walking although they know that without assistance he will perish. Cleary seeing such a gruesome occurrence must disturb them deeply and the child has a harder time assimilating this. Still, both know that they cannot help him. They only have the choice of how to deal with this. The moment that reflects this idea to the fullest is:
“They went on. The boy was crying. He kept looking back. When they got to the
bottom of the hill the man stopped and looked at him and looked back up the road.
The burned man had fallen over and at that distance you couldn’t even tell what it was. I'm sorry, he said. But we have nothing to give him. We have no way to help
him. I'm sorry for what happened to him but we can’t fix it. You know that, don’t
you? The boy stood looking down. He nodded his head. Then they went on and he
didn’t look back again.” (50)
What most shocked me of this scene was not the fact both left their humanity behind long ago but that the boy supposedly being innocent accepted this so easily. He cried but he understood the situation. This attitude makes a testament to the hardships they have experienced before this point and also it proves such a thing has happened to them multiples times before. This leads me to the conclusion that their situation has “broken” both of them. The fact that the child has lost all hope could signify that humanity, in this book, has lost its future as well. Since I have not finished the book I cannot say for sure the true message the author tries to portray in his work but this could prove to be a possibility later on: children can symbolize the future and what is to come, could this child represent that he views humanity’s future as one without hope?
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