7. If every book is an author's attempt to answer one of life's questions, what question is McCarthy attempting to answer? Explain.

This question is a hard one for me because I don’t think McCarthy was trying to answer a life question, or at least I didn’t get that sense. But if he were to be answering a life question, maybe it would be something like “Does the need humans have for one another trump the will to die in live or die situations?” The reason I think it’s something like this is because it was something McCarthy kept bringing up, like on page 55, where the boy said “I wish I was with mom” who had died. But as I keep looking for evidence for my first question, the more it seems like the wrong question. The real question I think definitely has to do with something about love and death, but I cannot seem to come up with one that makes sense. The reason I think this is because in my mind the most powerful parts of the book were the parts where the boy and his father would talk about death with one another, like on page 170 when the father says to the son, “When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too”. This sentence to me was a very important part of the book, because it seemed to wrap up the emotions both the man and his son had. They both were in a very complex situation were they both wanted to die, and wanted to be at peace, but they neither one of them could die because they needed the other to survive, because without the other they had no world, they had nothing. I think that is why the boy was able to get along in the end, because he gets introduced to other things, and his father was no longer his whole world.