On page 131, it caught my attention that the boy mentioned the little boy that he saw/ thought he saw a while ago in the book. Do you think that the boy actually saw a little boy, or do you think that the little boy was delirious and imagined seeing a little boy? What do you think that this little boy represented? In my opinion, the little boy represented the old world, before the apocalyptic event, but the little boy disappeared. I am curious if that means that there is no chance that the world will return to order and be anything like the world before the apocalypse.
On that same page, the father flashes back to remembering the mother, and then thinks "each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins...so be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not." At the beginning of the paragraph he says, "Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world." I cannot help but think that he had dreamt of the mother, and hates dreams like those because maybe he is afraid of romanticizing their relationship in his head, which might catch him off guard. Catching him off guard will not allow him to be as aware as he needs to be in order to continue protecting himself and the boy and to keep them both alive until they finish their journey to the South. These memories or dreams make him very jumpy, so jumpy that on the next page, "he almost raised his pistol" at the reflection of themselves in a mirror. It has obviously been a very long time since they have looked at themselves, so long that he probably had forgotten what they looked like. This world has definitely taken its toll on the father, but amazingly not so much on the son just yet.
Wonderful analysis. I think maybe he is over-romanticizing his relationship with the mother. I believe that he feels he needs to carry a certain amount of hate/resentment towards her to survive and for his son to survive. To sympathize with her too much is to condone her choice to commit suicide, and his greatest fear is that he and the boy will give up.
ReplyDeleteThe father and the boy both sensed humans in the area they were in so I believe the young boy that the boy saw was real. People, like them, I think were being extremely careful so as soon as he saw a human he hid which is why I think the boy disappeared. I definitely agree with Jon in that the father is almost forced to hate his dead wife in order to carry on. He cannot have that weakness or him and the boy are more likely to die.
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