The Baby on the Spit........

      In comparison to the other key episodes, there isn’t much tension built up before the discovery of the baby; the reader knows that something significant is going to happen, the ‘smoke stood vertically in the air’ which resembles an image of hell, but unlike some of the more horrifying aspects of the book, this is portrayed as more of a dark scene which isn’t supposed to scare the reader, just more shock them into realising the man and the boy’s reality. Once again, the man and the boy are very cautious when getting closer to the danger but as per usual, the man insists on going nearer, worried for his son’s physical health, but in doing so he exposes him to a baby on a spit and wonders ‘if he’d ever speak again’, harming his mental health. This repetition of circumstances shows the reader that there is nothing that anyone can do right; if the man hadn’t taken his son towards the smell of food then he would die of starvation, yet this constant exposure to horrific things if gradually killing off his son’s spirit which is measured by the gradual disintegration of the world as it unravels and more and more things become ruined. When they do come across the baby, it is described to be ‘a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit’. This mirrors the thought that all humanity is being lost and also that all emotion is gone too. The baby isn’t described as such; it’s named ‘an infant’ to show that the characters can’t afford to feel any emotion towards it. The fact that it’s headless and gutted also shows the reader that people just see other people as animals, there is no humanity left other than people’s existence, they’re no longer living as humans, just mere beings, walking the Earth until their ultimate death. This is also shown within the section as the characters are described to be ‘pilgrims reroute to their several and collective deaths’ which shows the reader that they seem to be being conned by God; their walking on a pilgrimage to learn something about God and make some significant discovery, yet once on their mission, all they learn is that God is evil and corrupt and is making them walk straight to their deaths. After this awful incident however, the reader gets an insight into how the boy’s mind is slowly turning as pessimistic as everyone else’s as they see him run which the man tells us ‘he’d not seen in a long time’, giving the impression that, up until this point, the boy had been too depressed at some of the things he had seen, but after this incident, he got over so quickly as the element of surprise at seeing a horrible sight had disappeared and was no longer something which affected him. This sickens the reader as, not only is he completely fine at seeing a charred baby, he runs and plays and acts like a normal child would had they stumbled across any other cooked animal. It shows us that the boy, who started the book with all the innocence the world had left, has lost it all and now, like every other man or woman left walking the Earth, see’s all humans as animals and nothing more.