Diana's Response p. 1-50

"Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he
said. You might want to think about that.
You forget somethings, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you
want to forget." p. 12

Two things are happening in this dialogue: 1) the man is trying to protect his son from being affected by the images of death and decay surrounding them by telling him to exert control over what he witnesses and 2) the antithesis in the last sentence reveals the little control that the man has himself over his memory. The relationship between the man and the boy is at times one of mutual help, but more often the father tries rather futilely to protect his son. However, in this world he does not have enough control to truly protect his boy from hunger or from horror. His effort to do so is moving. Throughout the early part of the novel, the man struggles with dreams and memories of life before the apocalypse as he is unable to reconcile the world he used to know with the reality before him now. Ironically, the son is better able to cope with the world than his father, having grown up in it.

"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all." p. 28

Here, the man is reflecting on the early days after the world changed from what it was before and again having trouble reconciling his past with his present. However, the reflection is that the boy already understands the present very well, having grown up under only the conditions that exist at that moment. Earlier, when the boy drank the coke and he asked his father if he'd "ever" have one again his father claimed ever was a long time. But now we can see that the boy's sense of time is different and more practical for this new world than his father's. He accepts the loss of things like coke and civilization as normal and regular. "Ever" then, is a condition of things, rather than a length of time.

"Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? p. 32"

Again we see the difference in the perceptions of the world of the man and the boy. For the man, the world exists in this ashen, decayed state as a loss of what once was. For him, things in the world are "never to be" again, and he cannot stop thinking about the possibilities. For the boy, these things simply never were. He does not feel the aching loss of his mother because he was too young to know her. He does not worry about the past; in fact, he is somewhat afraid of knowing it, like his fear when the man took him to his childhood home.