One of the prominent themes that struck me was the theme of Good Guys and Bad guys. The first mention of this is when the father explains to the boy that they are the ‘Good Guys’ and that they are trying to find other good people. Being young, the boy accepts this and holds it to heart. But this concept is challenged throughout the novel. One of the examples of this is when the roadagents or bad men get stuck on the road and find the man and the boy hiding. To protect the boy, the man shoots the roadagent in the back of the head and kills him. This causes the boy to question whether they are the good guys or not and the father reassures him that they are. We also see the boy questioning whether they are good when they come across the thief and leave him to die and when the man shoots the archer with the flare. The concept of good and bad is played out in several different stories but it’s important to analyze the concept. For one, I think it is interesting that almost always in human nature, we make ourselves the good guys and we justify whatever we do. People will take this too extreme to justify immoral actions they take that most will see as bad. But in the road, the characters no longer have the luxury of morality or living by an honest code. The only rule is to survive and by any means necessary. The man’s goal is to protect the boy at all costs from any form of harm, to the point where he would kill the boy to prevent him from suffering. The road shows us, the reader, that morality is a luxury in our modern-day society and that the characters in the novel have to abandon past morals to survive.
Categories
Great American Novels 