In an earlier comment, Erin said, "When we're stripped of our most basic needs, we see what really matters: food, water, shelter, safety, love, companionship. Or we become marauding cannibals." Did you have the sense that most people who were left were of the latter sort, the Bad People, or did you think most people might be Good but there were just enough Bad ones out there that, for survival reasons, you had to assume the Bad People were everywhere and that you were in "constant peril," as Erin said?
I couldn't get a good feel for what McCarthy thought about basic human nature, really. On the whole, it seemed sort of bleak, but then we have this shining example of selfless love between the dad and son. The father figure could seem rather cold and dismissive when it came to others, but I always had the sense that he was being that way to protect his son. He didn't want to share with others because it would mean less for his boy. The scarcity of food and warmth and comfort made it so difficult to be good and trusting. And I wondered where, exactly, the boy got his unerring sense of goodness. Was it from the example of his father's love? But his father wasn't always good to others (not in the boy's sense). Where would the boy have learned his goodness — it seemed almost Christlike sometimes, something even the father seemed in awe of — or is McCarthy saying goodness is not something you acquire, like reading and writing, but something you just have or you don't? Did you have any sense of this?
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I thought some of the most tense scenes in the book were when the father acted against the boy's sense of justice/kindness/generosity
In those moments the boys' morality and the father's choice against it showed us that even he had to make "bad people" like choices as the adult.
In the end what made a bad person or a good person was the decision to exploit (or eat) other people. But that the father and son had to leave others to die and even kill another person to protect themselves makes the good/bad distinction a little messier.
I'm suprised to see you call the child "christlike." Since it is the father who eventually lays down on the beach and dies, sacrificing himself for the life of his son.
And it is the father's love that sustains them. The boy loves too, but in an incomplete way becuase he is a child.
I'm not sure McCarthy addressed where goodness comes from. Perhaps he left it open to our interpretation, our discussion. He simply presented some people as good and some people as bad. We are to discover the why.
Yes, those scenes had a lot of tension. And, really, they are scenes that we all probably had in our childhoods (Mom, let me keep this mangey stray/No, it's sick/We can fix it/We can't afford it ... or the homeless people you wanted to come live in your basement). Only here they are magnified because so much is at stake.
I guess I see Christ as sort of childlike somehow, of a purity of heart and faith in miracles and capacity for forgiveness that we (often wrongly!) associate with children. I was raised Catholic, though, so my acquaintance with the actual scriptures is appalling.
You're right, though, that the boy's love is incomplete. It's naive, no matter how moving it is or how jaded it makes us feel.
Interesting point about the dad. I saw all his actions as self-sacrificing. It would have been easier for him, with his illness, to just lie down and expire, but he kept going for the boy. I didn't see his actual death as a sacrifice, though. I just saw it as, well, he finally died of that terrible disease.
The father's love DID sustain them. I wondered a few times why he didn't just end it for both of them. Did you guys? I think there was a passge in the book where the father realizes he simply could not take his son's life, even if it was the "humane" thing to do. It was too counter to his heart.
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