Three open-ended questions that I had as reading the book

1. Why did the woman leave the man and the boy? (Why had the relationship gotten worse?)

A: From page 55 to 58, the man looks back into the time when he had a big fight with the woman over whether letting her leave the man or not. You can see that the woman is extremely upset with the man and doesn’t believe or trust him anymore as a spouse or a partner of the survival. She thinks that he’s going to stand as a spectator and let the boy and her get killed by “them”. It seems like there’s a great danger lingering around them, and she seems like to be scared of those dangerous people.
Did the man really consider the woman as a useless burden and that’s why he lost his credit? This question just relates to the question #1 above. She says on page 56, I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two. It tells you that the man has done something not good with the bullet. There are two possible scenarios. First one is that he might have wasted it in a stupid way, and he gave a bad impression to the woman that he isn’t a reliable person to protect her and their son. Another one is that he might have killed an innocent person or killed someone in a cruel way. She got frightened by his cruelness and thought that he could betray them at some point and that’s why she wanted to leave him.
The man’s reaction to her anger shows that he made a serious-enough mistake to drive her nuts. He just begged her not to leave him and promised that he would do anything for her. However, it seems like the woman is ready to face the death and she’d rather accept her death than being with the man. The conversation on page 57 supports that idea. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot. Death is not a lover. Oh yes he is. Finally, she decided to leave the man and even the boy. Maybe she thought at least the boy would be safer with the man than herself.

2. Is the man a cold-hearted and cruel person or a practical and penetrating person?

A: The answer depends on which part you gave more attention to. According to two incidents that reflected his characteristic, you can see that he took an easy but kind of heartless way to save his son and his own life. …leveled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead. (Pg.66) You can see his action as a way to protect his child, which is doing his duty well as a father of one. Otherwise, he seems to be good at shooting a gun. Maybe he has had many chances to use it, but in a negative perspective, he seems to have no sympathy for the man he just killed and it’s like he doesn’t feel guilty just because the man tried to have his son as a hostage.
At least at that time, he had the reason to act in such a cold way, but when the boy wanted to save the dog and another boy he saw in a village, the man said big no-no to his son. We could take him and we could take the dog. The dog could catch something to eat. We cant. And I’d give that little boy half of my food. Stop it. We cant. (Pg.86) If the man had had a little bit of understanding, he should at least have persuade the boy with the reasons that they couldn’t do that. He just kept saying no to the boy, which could have hurt his feeling. As I wrote, you can evaluate the man’s personality in either positive or negative way, and you can even say that he is a double-faced person.

3. Who are “the bad guys”?

A: As I mentioned in the Question #1, there’s a danger around the man and the boy and that is not just an apocalypse but also some bad people. From page 51 to 100, we saw two groups of people which the man called as “the bad guys”. It seems like there are sort of small groups who are moving together and there is a tension between the groups. The man emphasized the fact that they’re good guys to ensure the boy that they’re doing nothing wrong, different from the men they faced. Are we still the good guys? he said. Yes. We’re still the good guys (Pg.77) You can also find out that the man and the boy are hiding from others because they don’t have enough power to protect themselves. All they have is a pistol that the man’s got. When they escaped from the group of men after shooting the man, they left the cart behind them. When they came back to get it, everything was searched by the bad guys. You can see that there’s nobody to trust except for the partner(s) in this chaotic situation. So, if you want to know a definition of “the bad guys” in this book, it could be “the people who don’t move within your group and can steal your goods and food or even who can kill you”.