The Road Section I

Questions

1.  How did the man and the boy survive?  Will we ever find out?
2.  Is there anyone else alive?
3.  Where are they?

Parallel

"He raised his face to the paling day...Are you there? he whispered...Have you a heart?  Damn you eternally have you a soul?  Oh god, he whispered.  Oh God."  (11-12).

The man says: "This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy" (26).

This is a book that seems to revolve around religion and whether the characters have faith in God.  The man doubts his existence in the first quote, but tell us of the happy times he had at Christmas (an obviously religious holiday) when he was a child.

Contrast

"The shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste" (8).

"In his dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy" (18).

Everything in the real world is gray and ash, whereas the world in the man's dreams in lively and full of color, which the man hates because it tortures him.