Ann Linden Holdeman
Kaplan
Topic #6
October 28, 2015
The Road In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the woman whom we can assume to be the mother says,
“The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would have never come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body” (McCarthy 63).
The woman explains that we, as humans, all need something to live for. On several occasions throughout the novel, the reader distinguishes that the man is desperately clinging to his life for the boy. The man teaches the boy about the importance of faith, hope, and love in this atypical love story. The man talks about God more than once in the novel, insinuating that he was a faithful man at some point in his life. However faithful he may have been at one point, the man has lost most of his faith. The speaker explains, “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 10). The reader observes that though the man may not put his faith in God, he puts his faith in the
…show more content…
“That the boy was all that stood between him and death,” the woman points out (McCarthy 34). The man loves the boy enough to stay and fight with him because there is even the slightest chance that the world will be better again. Several times throughout the novel, the reader witnesses the man wanting to give up and take the easy way out, but he stops himself. “I’ll kill you where you stand,” declares the man to a thief they encounter on the road (McCarthy 264). The thief has stolen all of their belongings, which of course triggers the man’s anger, but the man threatens him more mercilessly after the thief simply looks at the boy. There is an even stronger love for the boy because he is all the man has