In any desperate situation it is logical that one would consider suicide in order to escape a more horrific death:
“Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said. There could be some corn or something. Let’s go, the man said.” (p. 16)
The boy is unaffected by the apparent suicide of what can only be assumed was a family. This is likely to be because the boy has seen so much death in his short life that he has become desensitised to it. The father is noticeably more upset as it reminds him of the endless arguments he had with his wife about the same act: “they are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant.” (p. 58)
The following morning the boy says to his father: “She’s gone isn’t she?” and there is no depiction of the boy’s grief. Perhaps the narrator opted to leave out the emotional side of the characters, grief and terror being so common in the new world that it is redundant to describe it. More likely, the boy is already hardened to the horrific reality of his world and his mother’s death is another happening out of his control.
At the end of the novel when his father dies, the boy is clearly stricken with grief. He lies with the body for two days before seeking out protection from someone else. As his father was the last person in his life, or ‘his world’ as is suggested at the beginning of the novel, his father’s death might be more traumatic as the world he knew was ended.
When the boy sees someone of his own age, he desperately tries to reach and help them. This terrifies the father as he is afraid of human interaction for fear of the ‘bloodcults’. The boy is inconsolable and refuses to listen to his father:
“There’s no one to see. Do you want to die? Is that what you want?
I dont care, the said, sobbing. I dont care.
The man stopped. He stopped and squatted and held him. I’m sorry, he said. Dont say that. You musnt say that.” (p. 89)
This short interaction is important to understanding the boy as is shows how he would put the possibility of helping another his own age before his own safety despite all of his father’s warnings. In the boy’s innocence is the possibilty of reigniting compassion and morality in the new world as the child, uncorrupted by whatever drives the bloodcults, is willing to help another.
The father is not immune either to the seduction of ending one’s life: “even now some part of him wished they’d never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over” (p.163). The consistent movement and sparse resources leads the reader to think that the father and his son live on ‘borrowed time’. They cannot continue to live in such a situation for an extended period of time and there is no evidence that there is a different situation further south. Their journey is a refusal to die; like a tired performer that refuses to leave the stage even when the audience is over half gone, they continue to walk even when everyone else has given up on them.
