The man has no idea what he and the boy will do when they reach the coast.  He doesn’t expect to be rescued, to find “good” people who will take him and the boy in. Every human being they run across is a danger, to be avoided. Moreover, the man is ill. He coughs often, hacking up blood, and over the course of the novel he weakens. He knows he is going to die, and the boy knows that too. The man knows the boy will outlive him, and at first he thinks about killing the child to save him from the horrors of the new world, but ultimately he knows he cannot kill the boy, even out of love.  He loves the boy too much. 

The novel is dedicated to McCarthy’s young son. Not surprisingly, then, The Road is about a father’s fierce love for his young son, whose survival he wants to ensure at all costs.  The conversations between the boy and his father often seem a bit precious, but they are exactly the kinds of conversations a parent and a young child will have. Children are resentful, suspicious, anxious, insecure, loving, protective, fearful. The boy expresses all these emotions, more or less constantly. 

He is especially disturbed when his father enters a house that belonged to someone else, or when he takes possessions that belonged to the once-living, or when he forces a thief who had taken all their possessions to strip naked.  This is why he often asks his father whether they are still the “good guys” who “carry the fire.”  The man assures the boy that they are still the good guys, but that most of the people they might meet in the world are not. 

Some might find an underlying sentimentality in the novel, especially in the exchanges between the man and the boy. Children in most novels are better seen than heard.  Few writers portray them realistically.  But McCarthy succeeds not only in portraying the boy in an utterly convincing way — in speech, mannerisms, and behavior — but also in how he interacts with his father.  And McCarthy succeeds as well in conveying the man’s concern and love for his son. A parent will read this novel through the lens of his or her own children and his or her love for those children. Those who do not have children may not fully appreciate this aspect of the novel.  What some may mistake for sentimentality is in fact love and tenderness - surprising yet wholly logical and natural emotions in this novel by Cormac McCarthy. 

There is no wife or mother in the novel. She resides in the man’s memory, and at first he thinks of her often. In one of his memories they argue about her intention to kill herself.  She sees only a horrible death for herself and the boy — she is sure they’ll both be raped, tortured, cannibalized — and she doesn’t see the point of struggling on. She sees no future for herself or her family or the rest of the world. She also sees herself as another mouth to feed. Her death by suicide — in a scene that is implied but not described, she slits her wrists with sharp flints her husband has taught her how to use for that purpose — simplifies matters for the author, who has one less character to worry with, and for the boy and his father. It’s clear that the man loved his wife, but it’s clear too, as time goes on, that in the new world of gray dust and endless walking towards an empty ocean there is no place for her memory. In a wrenching, understated scene, the man takes out her photograph and, after looking at it a last time, places it face up on the road and walks on.