Shooting of the Roadrat....

      The pages 62-69 allow the reader to first encounter the people who the man and the boy are avoiding. The tension builds right from the start of this scene when ‘something woke them’; we are given no hints as to what this something could be which adds to the growing tension of the event. Also, the way that McCarthy dives straight into a new day with no use of pathetic fallacy or an insight into what the man is thinking is unusual for the reader, making them aware that trouble lies ahead. The tension continues to build when the man and the boy first see the men and their vehicles; the fact that they have vans to drive around in shows instantly that they are dangerous as in the apocalyptic world, only those who have any power, and power meaning a gun, can obtain such things. They are also fairly intimidating, the man and the boy are just two vulnerable people wandering the road, and an army of men with guns and obvious wealth of a kind do silence the atmosphere. When the roadrat comes closer to the man and the boy he takes his hood down on the request of the man; at this point the tension decreases as we now have it confirmed that the those they are afraid of are just human beings and when this is revealed, it makes the reader a lot less scared for the two characters as there is a greater fear of what they didn’t know than there was of the actual roadrat. However, before the reader can relax, the man shoots the roadrat in order to save his son’s life and they run. During this short period of time, McCarthy uses the repetition of ‘and’ to build the tension by listing things which the man does in sequences. It shows the reader that in the life they are living, there is no escape; as soon as the tension in their lives decreases, there will be something else consistently on to them, relentlessly making them scared and their lives a general misery. The next problem they face is the boy; after watching his father shoot and kill another human being, he is described to be ‘as mute as a stone’, partly due to being stunned at the whole event, but also in disbelief that his father, someone he perceives to be a ‘good guy’ can possibly do such a thing. This is once again an example of McCarthy showing that in the apocalyptic world, you can do nothing right. Hand the man not intervened, both he and his son would have physically been destroyed as the roadrat would have either shot them dead or eaten them at some point. However, by shooting the enemy, he has mentally hurt his son as he has distanced himself from him again and the boy is now questioning what the point of being alive is, if he can’t live as a good person, why bother. This equates to the killing of the roadrat being a significant event as it develops the relationship between the boy and the man, but in a negative way. In some ways this could be considered as a good thing; the man knows he is dying, ‘there was a cough in his throat that never left’, and so realises that his son, at some point, is going to have to survive without him and knows it will be easier if he doesn’t need to grieve as much, and if he knows how to survive, something he will never learn if his father shelters him from the new world. This shows the nightmare which they are living in; it is a sorry state of affairs when a father feels he must distance himself from his son to save them both. The cough that never leaves also resembles what the world is doing to them; it’s mirrored by the grey sky that never changes and the general tone of misery that won’t go away. The killing of the roadrat also stands out as a key episode as it is one of the rare events in which something major happens which has ramifications later in the novel. For so long the reader listens to McCarthy talk about the sky and the bad guys and random memories from the past, that when something like this is incorporated into the story, it is viewed as something very important as the reader is used to a dull scene, not one full of action. We are left at the end of the section wondering, will they get caught? Will they still have the same relationship? And several other questions as this part end with such uncertainty.