2 Questions about The Road Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

2 Questions about The Road - Essay Example The sun is permanently hidden behind the clouds, as are the moon and stars. Everything, everywhere has been burned, turning the world into black and grey underneath a ‘sullen’ light that casts only feeble shadows at its peak. There are no animals, no plants and very few people. What life does survive is scarce and desperate, willing to commit atrocities upon one another for the simple necessity of food or clean water. â€Å"The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought† (McCarthy 75). The bond between the father and son is thus predicated on surviving in this very harsh environment where all they have is each other and the knowledge still stored in the father’s mind from the time before the disaster. The man is forced to adapt to an entirely foreign world despite all his conceptions of a better place while his son is enlightened by his father’s confusion. The man’s reluctance to accept the reality before him forces him to feel pity for the young son. This is obvious in the touching scene when he finds the can of Coke. â€Å"[H]e put his thumbnail under the aluminum clip on the top of the can and opened it. He leaned his nose to the slight fizz coming from the can and then handed it to the boy. †¦ You drink it †¦ It’s because I won’t ever get to drink another one, isn’t it?† (McCarthy 20). As the man comes to realize, the world he remembers will never be anything more than a fantasy world to his son, a place of unrealizable possibilities for which the son must ultimately pity the father for having lost. Although the man and the boy consider themselves the good guys, defenders of the old knowledge and the bonds of enlightenment, there are also