The Road- Post 1 Question #6

I thought that The road was an interesting book. At times I found it to be very tedious reading, but toward the end i was getting anxious. I was confused throughout the entire book, because i wanted to know what had happened to the previous world. I understood the journey they were taking, but not the event that lead up to them taking the journey. I had a couple questions pertaining to the author's choices. Why didn't he name the characters? Why did he never reveal the age of the boy and his father?

While reading the book i had many questions and sections where i annotated.

Page 43- " ...but the roads are still here. Yes. For a while. How long a while? I don't know. Maybe quite a while. There's nothing to uproot them so they should be ok for a while." The use of the word "while" was funny to me, because the boy and the man were going back and forth and had no actual time frame for "a while".

Page 49- The father really upset me on this page, because he saw the man limping and told his son that they were going to leave him there without any help. I didn't understand why the father was being so selfish until they got further down the road. I now know that he didn't stop to help him because they had nothing to offer him and he would've been an extra burden upon their journey. He would slow them down. Besides, the father didn't want to expose his son to suffering.

Page 178- i was shocked when the father woke up and discovered that the little boy had gone off. throughout the book his son had been scared to leave his father's sight, but at this point is when the boy began to step out and become curious and adventurous. In their situation they may not be a good thing, but overall i was proud to see that the boy was no longer cowardly.