The people left quickly, their food still cooking, so the man and the boy examine the abandoned campsite. Nothing remains in the woods, and the man surmises that the people were frightened of the man since they have a pistol. They smell cooking, and the man and the boy circle around it. They see smoke coming out of the woods, and the boy fears it is a trap. The next morning, the protagonists continue onwards. They make camp, and while the boy sleeps, the father sees a group of people, three men and a pregnant woman, who pass them by. They decide to leave less trash behind so that anyone behind them will not know they have a food supply. The father tries to prevent his son from looking, but the boy is surprisingly serene.Īt a stop, the father and the boy think they are being followed. These people were killed on the road in a great fire. They come across a gruesome stretch of road upon which corpses lay “half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling” (161). They continue to travel towards the sea, but the father is extremely weak. The man says, “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up” (160). One night, his son has a nightmare but refuses to describe it to his father. He watched a group of men set fire to a mass of serpents in the ground. The man remembers a winter long ago, when he was slightly older than his son’s present age.

Section 7 extends from page 159 to page 184.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy