Memories

Almost done with the novel, I began thinking about the next blog I had to write to please dear Mr. Tangen. The idea of having to write again and have him check scared me so I began. For this blog I did not have an idea of what to write. I was not inspired at the time I wrote it so I started looking at other people's blogs and then I took many ideas and formed it into one. B y looking at one of my classmates blogs, I saw how memories were used and I agreed and thought it was the closest idea to what I had while I was reading The Road.

In the novel, the father had lived a normal life for most of his lifetime. He had a mother, a father and a normal home. It was only until after he had gotten married and had the little boy that things started to change. People began to die off and suffer tremendously from the changes, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. (The book does not specify what exactly happened that wiped out all of the people, but we can infer that there was much suffering and change occurring.) The mother shot herself because she could not handle or adapt to the harsh changes occurring in the environment. The father on the other hand, took the boy as his life and guarded him as so.

Later in the book, the father makes references to his past life and memories in subtle ways.

seeing places and having flashbacks of how they used to be and the effects those places had on the father as a person was one of the hardest things he had to cope with. When he gives his son a coke, which he found in an abandoned vending machine, he thinks that "this is what I had in my time, but you will probably never have ever again and you will never fully appreciate it the way I do." When they went to places of the father's past, he thought, "you will never know this place to be what it was, but it kills me to see it so barren and deserted."

The father's past allows him to continue and be successful in his future. He knows about things that the little boy will never know about. He has experienced things and the company of other people, which have gone and will never return. He has lived a life that no one can ever match up with.