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Nice, light reading, huh? In my notes I described it as, "if Camus wrote a Mad Max film and Hemingway translated it into English...."

If you haven't read the novel yet, be forewarned -- I'm not going to shy away from spoilers.

Two potential trajectories from my notes and then I'll address some of the comments you two have already made.

1) The gun is a means of escape from Hell -- where "Hell is other people" (I'm sure I don't need to tell you that's an Oscar Wilde quote, but I'll mention it just so you don't think that I think it's from "The Road"). In this case, Hell is usually a distorted reflection of the way the world was prior to the apocalypse. The militias, the cannibals, the pirates and the bandits that the protagonists encounter along the way have all managed survival by adapting predatory strategies out of the raw material of the culture that lies in ruins around them. That's an observation that you can more or less apply to any of the less literary post-apocalyptic stories out there (like "Mad Max"), but it also points to the moral dilemma that increasingly takes center stage as the conflict of the story. Because the "good guys" in this case aren't particularly altruistic or charitable; the son tries to be, but is kept in check by the father, who demands a kind of humane ambivalence. And in the later scenes of the novel, that struggle comes to a head, as the father attempts to apply a makeshift eye-for-an-eye rule, while the son increasingly laments their unwillingness to take a chance on others. And this is getting way ahead of ourselves, in all likelihood, but I'd even go so far as to suggest that the father's death releases the child from that protective ambivalence and allows him to risk everything in order to trust a stranger.

2) The road of the title is probably a more versatile and multi-faceted emblem than I can grasp at the moment, but I'd like to suggest that it serves in part as a metaphor for the trajectory of civilization; that is, for Progress, inexorable and doomed. Particularly salient to me is the passage on p. 161, where the father and son pass through a burned over stretch of road, littered with burned traffic and bodies. "Why didn't they leave the road? / They couldn't. Everything was on fire." There's a self-destructive component to this trajectory (which persists in the "bad guys"), even as there's the utopian component that imagines a temperate beach and the promise of easy survival at the end.

Now, for your comments:
irishrosem: Right from the outset the physical survival of the father and son appear to be two sides of the same coin, one could not survive without the other.

In terms of the brute physical strain of survival, I don't know that the share was even. There are several instances in which the son proves to be a liability. The boy obviously wouldn't be able to survive without some help, but the father would probably have fared better without the extra mouth to feed.

At the same time, it's obvious that he wouldn't have the will to survive without the possibility of his son living on after him. And what struck me in the book is that part of the way the father justifies going on -- even when it would be easier and perhaps more humane to opt out, once and for all -- is that he hopes to pass on to the son some sense of civilization as he knew it. They talk repeatedly about "carrying the fire", and one passage in particular struck me as relevant to the whole thing. The man has had a dream involving strange, silent creatures: "He thought perhaps they'd come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own." (p. 130; American hardback edition) That strikes me as a potentially fatal moment, but they press on anyway.

For me, the idea that recurred most often, and was most salient, even if it was never made explicit, was that of culture death. The father and son are picking together through the ruins of a world that can never be as real to the son as it is to the father, and the boy realizes, probably more acutely than the father, how much of the burden he must carry alone in ensuring that some measure of the achievements of civilization survive their ordeal. Another exchange that struck me was this: "You're not the one who has to worry about everything. / ... / He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes, I am, he said. I am the one." (p. 219) The man has the luxury of concentrating his worry on the boy's survival. The boy has to worry about the state of the world he stands to inherit.

And it's a broken world, one so broken that he may not have anything to show for his efforts, no matter how hard he tries.

And despite the father's urging to his son that they remain positive, it also seems evident-through the man's nostalgic wanderings and dreams of his wife "In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy" (p 15)-that the father would not struggle to survive if it weren't for the child.

That wife -- she's barely a character at all, and you could probably do a lot with the question of what her feminine identity entails. For my part, she reminds me of the shrouded figure from Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner", the embodiment of death as an appealing alternative to the burden of life.

They are, quite literally, "each the other's world entire" (p 5).

And that world is built on expectation. There's a passage that suggests as much, though subtly. I didn't think to write it down, but the gist is that the man is looking at a book case full of crumbling books, and realizes that their appeal lay in the expectation of some fulfillment. With the rest of the world gone, that expectation was annihilated, and he felt no need to bother rescuing the books. For their parts, the man expects his child to carry on "the fire", and the boy expects the father to kindle that fire in him.

The text tells us that the man and the boy are "each the other's world entire." This phrasing and the idea behind the quote immediately struck me.

The phrasing may recall the Talmudic saying that, "he who saves one life saves the world entire." Just thought I'd throw that in there.

One resonance, I suppose, could be the observation that you can't really have a civilization without at least two participants. If by "the world entire" we mean civilization (in a very broad sense), then you could take both phases pretty literally. Particularly when your civilization really is made up of just two people.

Dissident Heart: I wonder if the father is honest in his answer though.

This is just personal interpretation, but I think that one concern in the back of the father's mind might have been that, without the son, he'd have fallen into the same behavior as those around him -- the total abandonment of prior moral norms. And it seems entirely possible with me that, as a matter of personal character, he might have chosen suicide rather than risk turning immoral.

But that's pretty speculative, and I'd say it's textually more sound to say that the father felt a strong pull towards death as a form of reunion with his lost wife, and probably would have felt that pull more strongly if it had been compounded by the loss of his son as well.

I was often reminded of many concentration camp survivor narratives while reading the Road.

Heh. I was reminded of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". "The Road" could almost be seen as a photo-negative response to that book.

Another photo-negative: while reading "The Road", I was also reading John Reader's "Africa: A Biography of the Continent", the first 4th of which deals with the geographic development of the continent and the evolution of humanity right up 'til the advent of human culture. So quite by accident I managed to get a stereo-optic view of the build up, and eventual demise, of human civilization. Needless to say, "Africa" will probably color some of my comments concerning "The Road". Fair warning.

And another book I was (re-)reading at the time: "The Witch-Crazes of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries", which, of course, presents its own kind of holocaust. I didn't think much of it at the time, but I suppose the "bad guys" in "The Road" could be compared to the predatory witch-masters of Trevor-Roper's historical study.

Thanks, Chris. I feel confident that I speak for the three of us when I say that we appreciate you leveraging your administrative abilities to draw some extra attention the the discussion. Hopefully that'll bring a few more voices into the mix.

Rose and DH --
I feel like we're tossing out a lot of interesting ideas without really latching on one particular aspect of the novel. I'd like to have a little more back and forth on something fairly specific. We can move on after that, but I feel like the conversation is a little scattershot. Is there any one subject you guys would like to focus on for a little while?

I'll take a crack at Niall's questions...

Was the father selfish? Why didn't he kill the boy? Is there any hope for the boy?

I'd say selfish motives play a part in the way the father behaves, but I wouldn't call him especially selfish.

The easiest explanation for why he doesn't kill the boy is that he can't. Physically, of course, he could; but as character he seems constitutionally incapable of destroying something he loves that much. There's also an intimation in the novel that the man himself can't quite put his finger on why it's so important to keep the boy alive. The best way he can think of to express it to the boy is that he was "appointed by God to do that." (p. 65) There's no evidence to suggest that he means that literally -- that he had a vision in which God commanded him to take care of the boy -- so I take it as an expression of a feeling that he can't express any better way. It suggests a couple of things to me: 1) that it's an imperative that feels, to him, overwhelming; and 2) that it feels to him to be an external imperative, something he receives as though from some force outside himself.

And I'd say that, bleak though it sounds, the boys chances at prolonged survival are increased by the father's death. The father was so protective of the boy that he wasn't allowed to exercise trust, and in the end it's trust (though not without a grain of wariness) that provides the boy with a surrogate family. It would be taking that line of reasoning too far to say that the boy would have been better off without his father -- there was a lot to protect him from along the way, and some education in civilization to impart -- but their final separation strikes me as necessary, albeit mournful.

Do the pair have 'the fire' or is 'the fire' a myth?

I'd say yes on both counts. The fire is as real as they're capable of making it, but it is something that exists only in the relationship between them. That's myth in a very denotative sense, but in as much as it's operative in the way they behave, I'd say it's no less important for being mythical.

It is hard to distinguish them from the 'bad guys' since all they do is try to survive?

I actually made a note about this during my reading. Good, as applied to "the good guys" of the novel, is never really proactive. It's mostly defined by contrast to the predatory survival tactics of "the bad guys". The father's conception of good is that they'll try to survive so long as it doesn't seriously hurt anyone else's chance of survival, and I think that's a distinction worth making. The implication is that they'll risk death if the only way to survive is to hurt someone else. And he's consistent on that point right up until they find the exile who stole their cart, towards the novel's end. The son's complaint that they never really help anyone is a legitimate challenge to the father's view of good, but it doesn't equate them to the bad guys. The big reproach, I think, is that the father's conception of good has, with the recovery of their cart, started to waver.

And I can't help but wonder if the son's reproach -- and the father's realization that he has started to toe that line -- doesn't play into his finally succumbing to the sickness that's dogged him throughout the novel. He seems not merely resigned to his death, but almost content with it, in part, it seems to me, because he feels assured that his son will be a better guardian of the fire than he himself would be.

Would you take your own life if you were forced to live in such a world? Would I kill one of my loved ones to prevent their suffering in such a world?

I probably wouldn't. I have strong personal reservations about suicide, and I'm probably constitutionally more Hippocratic than most medical professionals. Although, with circumstances changing that drastically, who can say what any of us would do? That's a test of character that most of us have only read about.

Incidentally, we can now refer to the current topic as, "Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road". It won the 2007 Prize for Fiction.