Trying To Survive, Is A War

I have previously described the relationship betwwen a man and his son, and their struggle to survive in a place where fires had taken place and almost nothing was left. Without knowing the cause of their fight and the abundant deaths present in the setting, I jumped to the conclusion that a natural disaster had occured. Nevertheless, my assumptions towards the situation begin to change due to the reaction of the characters as they hear noises. McCarthy says "In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees", (28) allowing me to deduce a war had been going on. Although I decided to believe this theory, I should not forget that this was only a deduction. The one thing I could be sure about, was that the situation was getting worse every time, limiting the possibilities of survival of the man and his child. We can sense the preocupation of both through their voices and the fear in their minds. The man "knew that if [the snow] got much deeper they would have to leave the cart",(30) making this a new worry for him. But this was not his only torment. He dreamed "he did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark".(32) Although we remain unconscious of the meaning of this dream and the woman, I can not help but believe it has a connection to the man's wife. I was driven to this conclusion since there is no a presense of a mother or female figure with them and the dream somehow worries our main character. Throughout the next pages of the novel, McCarthy describes the situations they live the following days. Although they were sometimes lucky like when "they slept in the truck"(45)they found one night, their nightmare wasn't over. Even though there is not a direct connection present between the novel and World War II, I associate them both since I have seen several similarities between them.

World War II was a difficult time that involved various countries and along many people. The Road and this historic event are not alike in the way that they don't narrate the same situation nor the characters live under the same circumstances. Nevertheless, I find plenty similarities since both times are of struggle for survival. One being influenced by violence and the other by a still unknown cause, both let us sense desperation, hope, and love. Many of the victims of the Holocaust felt the three same feelings listed above as they were desperate to survive, hoping to live, and loving their significant ones. Probably I wasn't the only one to sense relationships between these two events, but the misteries of The Road and the possibility of more connections to World War II, are still left to be discovered.