Unique, Response to the Book, p.3-50

In this article, I'd like to discuss things I found interesting about this book. The first one to discuss is the structure of the novel, the second one is the personalities of the characters, and the last one is some motifs shown in the book.



1. Structure

The book mostly talks about the present, the man and the boy following the road to reach south. However, between those paragraphs showing the present, there appears some other paragraphs showing the man's (the protagonist's) mind and thoughts. They do not appear so often, but still, they come up a few times to give us some information about the past.

The novel starts with the story of the present.(p.3) The man wakes up, goes out, sees... And then, he thinks about the dream on a monster he had the night before. (p.3~4) After the talk about the dream, it goes back again to the story of the present.

Then, on page 12, a piece of memory of the man comes up. It's about the day he spent with his uncle on the lake. It's a seperate story from the main story, and it's giving a scene that can be contrasted with the ashed world of the present, emphasizing how the present world is horrible.

The next one is about the dreams the man has on his wife. (p.18~19) Through it, even if he doesn't really express his feelings about his wife directly, we can see that he really values the memory he has about his wife and he misses his wife.

* But here comes my question: reading the book, I became quite sure that the man, his wife and the boy are a blood-sharing family, and that the man loves and cares about the boy, but then why are they 'the man' and 'the boy', not 'the father' and 'the son'? The author is maybe doing that on purpose, to hide the bond between the father and the son? It just seems to me that the author is avoiding to make sure that the man's wife gave birth to the son, to emphasize that the boy does not remember anything about his mom.

Back to the topic. On the page 21, there comes another paragraph about the man's dream being so rich in color. Then on page 28, there's a paragraph on the first years of the post-apocalyptic world, full of refugees on the road. On page 32, there's another dream of his wife, whom he feels sorry to since he thinks he left his wife somewhere else alone to die. Then the man is busy living the real life, so that he doesn't have any thoughts to show us.

So, there's no strict structure the book has. It's just giving us paragraphs after paragraphs, mostly of the present life of the man and the boy. However, we shouldn't miss the paragraphs that give us some clues to figure the man's past and how the world was like before, and I expect to see them more throught the whole book.


2. Characters

1) The man
He's really cautious of the circumstances, so he keeps staring at the mirror to check his back, having guns near him and moving from one place to another. At the same time he misses his old days, wanting to see things from his childhood days and keep seeing his wife in his dream. Also, he's trying hard to carry out the role of father, by hugging the boy when it's cold and saying some words to give comfort to him when he knows it's not true.

2) The boy
I was actually surprised at this boy. He asks his papa whether he'll gonna die, he expects there to be no coke any more when he grabs a can for the first time, and he even got a promise from his father to drink the same with him, even if he knows that his father tried to save cocoa for him. On the other hand, he gets excited about sliding down the hill on the cart, seeing a waterfall and finding a toy in the cart, and get scared by a nightmare. He was sometimes like a grown-up and sometimes like an innocent child. That was why I was really sorry to him. Because the situation forces him to grow up, he has to be an adult when he must have the innocence of youth only.


3. Motif

There were three motifs I found: gray, the road, and the God.

The word 'gray' is the best word to describe the world, since it's covered with ash, the sky full of smoke and hardly a thing is alive.

The road is the path the man and the boy follow. Their destination is on the end of the road, and they keep following it. The road becomes the setting of the novel.

And the God. The man constantly questions the presence of God. It starts with the word 'godless' used to describe the world on page 4, and it's followed by a sentence, 'If he is not the word of God God never spoke.' on page 5 (* Well, I'm not sure whether 'he' means the boy or the man. Any of you guys got a clue?) .

And the man's feeling on the god is more clearly shown on page 11, when he asks 'Are you there? Will I see you at last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a hear? Damn you eternally have your soul?'. He is questioning the presence of God, or at least blaming God for not doing anything.

Beside these, on page 16, it says that a snowflake expired like the last host of christendom and we can say that it has a slight meaning of the end of christendom. On page 28, it refers refugees as 'creedless shells of men' and it shows that people lost their faith in god. The word god appears on page 31, yet it doesn't show the man's feeling about God.



-The End.