The Road 3

"You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand? Yes. He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said. Yes. We're still the good guys (65)."

            In this part of the novel of “The Road” the man and his son are along their journey through the world to find their new homeland. On this journey so far the man and his son had to face several encounters such as the people who tried to attack them and kill them but they are still alive. Several questions are starting to arise as the boy is noticing what is going on. In this quote the son does not know if they are still consider the “good guys” anymore because his father killed the people that tried to attack them. The father shot their enemy as a survival method and protection for his son. If he did not kill them then they could have died. The man said that he had to kill the man to protect his son and that God had assigned him to kill the man. But the boy does not know if his father should have killed the man, he wonders if they are still considered the “good guys” even though his father shot and killed a man. My reaction to this text is I feel that the man did the right thing by killing the attacker. He had to protect his son, and this shows that he will protect his son at all costs. The man will do whatever it takes for them to make it on this journey. I feel like they are still considered the “good guys” because it wasn’t as if they went searching for trouble, the trouble came to them and they were only trying to protect themselves which makes it justified that the man shot and killed the attacker who tried to kill them.

            The purpose of this passage is to show how much the man loves his son. He will do whatever it takes for them to survive, he will even go to extreme circumstances to protect his son as is shown in the passage when he shot and killed the man who tried to attack them. The man loves his son, and knowing that his wife committed suicide he has to show even more love to his son because he doesn’t have a mother anymore. The specific techniques used in this passage are rhetorical questions, tone, acknowledgement of a higher power and short sentence structure. The rhetorical questions in this passage such as “do you understand” and “are we still considered the good guys?” These rhetorical questions are meant to reassure the boy that even though his father killed someone they are still the good guys and that his father had to kill the man for the protection of himself and his son. The tone in this passage is confident. When the boy asks the question if they are still the good guys, the father says “yes” in a confident voice to make sure the boy still believes him and to show that his father believes that he made the right decision to kill the man. The father acknowledged an important figure in “God” in this passage. He says that God “appointed” him to kill the man. By the father saying this, he is yet again trying to reassure his son that he made the right decision. But the boy still questions if his father made the right decision. The short sentence structure used in this passage is a way that the father tries to make sure the boy believes in him and his decision. The overall effect of this passage is to show that the man loves his son and will do whatever it takes on this journey for them to survive.

            In this novel so far the word “human” means to try and survive under extreme living conditions and any other problems that you may encounter. The “humans” in this passage are the man and his son who are on their long journey throughout the world trying to survive after a disaster has hit their hometown. On this journey these “humans” were faced with attackers who could be considered “non human” because they tried to kill the man and his son. The word “human” means to be trying to survive under the harshest of conditions and situations. Our depictions of the future reveal that the present is not as easy as some people may think. People take things for granted but that is not always the case. In this situation the man did a good thing in the fact that he didn’t take the attacker for granted, if he took him for granted then he might of not killed the man because he wouldn’t have thought that the man would try and attack him. We use images and language to manipulate people’s minds by showing people things that are not true but we make them believe that it is true by the images or the language that is often written on it. We often see this in newspapers, magazines, and ads.