The Road: Pages 156-189 Summary & Analysis

They stop to eat lunch and the boy asks where they are. The man says he thinks they are about two hundred miles from the coast “as the crow flies.” The boy asks about crows, and whether any are left alive, or whether they could have escaped by flying to Mars. The boy asks if people could escape to Mars, but the man says there isn’t any food there either. The boy accepts that there aren’t any more crows except in books, but he asks the man if someone could see the sun if they flew high enough. The man says yes, and then he asks what happened to the boy’s flute. The boy says he threw it away.

They cross a river and reach a black, abandoned city. They stop on a hill and the boy asks about their “long term goals,” a phrase he heard the man use long ago. The man says he still doesn’t know. They turn a corner and see an old man shuffling along the road ahead of them. They catch up to him and he warily says he doesn’t have anything to steal. Then he sinks to the ground. The boy asks the man if they can help the old man. The man is suspicious but he agrees.

The man opens a can of fruit and the boy gives it to the old man. The old man eats all of it, and then the boy suggests they stop for the night and eat more food with him. The man agrees, but flatly refuses to take the old man with them in the morning. They help the old man up and he acts confused by their presence. He can’t see well, and he asks if the boy is a “little boy.” The old man says his name is Ely.

They make camp and light a fire. Ely says he has always been on the road, and that he knew some kind of apocalypse was coming. The man asks if he wished he was dead, and Ely says he wishes he had died, but as long as he’s alive he is going to live. He says “nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.” He says no one cares if you live or die, as “there is no God and we are his prophets.”

The man asks Ely about how he eats and stays alive, but Ely only answers vaguely. He admits that Ely isn’t his real name, as he doesn’t want people talking about him “in times like these.” Ely says he has lived “like an animal,” and he hasn’t seen a fire or a little boy in a long time. The man suggests that the boy is an angel or a god, but Ely says if men can’t survive then gods won’t either. He says it will be better when everyone is dead, as even death himself will die too then.

In the morning the man relents to the boy and gives Ely a few more cans of food. Ely doesn’t thank the boy, but the man says the boy isn’t kind so he can be thanked – he isn’t even sure why the boy is kind at all. Ely suggests that the boy might believe in God, but the man says he doesn’t know what the boy believes in. Ely doesn’t wish them luck, as he wouldn’t even know what luck meant anymore in such a world. They part ways and the boy doesn’t look back.

The boy is sad that they left Ely but he accepts that the old man will probably die. That night the man wakes up coughing and feels like he is going to die, and he asks aloud “Tell me how I am to do that.” The next night they discover that the gas tank is empty, as the boy forgot to turn off both valves, so they can’t have a fire. They keep traveling on, “thin and filthy as street addicts.”

They come to a coastal plain and some marshy land. One morning the man wakes up and the boy isn’t there, but the boy soon appears and says there’s a train in the woods. They go investigate it and find a diesel train stopped on some tracks. The man looks inside but finds nothing. Then they go up to the controls and the man pretends to operate it, but the train noises he makes mean nothing to the boy. Both of them know that “no train would ever run again.”

They go on and start to see small cairns and old messages scrawled by the side of the road. These were left by people leaving the cities after the food ran out. Soon after this the world was overrun by “men who would eat your children in front of your eyes” and looters who lived in the tunnels of cities. The pilgrims on the road died off, and the earth kept circling the sun like any other unknown planet.

The man realizes that they will run out of food before they reach the coast, as all the houses in this region were looted years ago. He shows the boy the map and the boy asks if the sea will be blue when they reach it. The man says he doesn’t know. The boy keeps looking at the map, finding his place in an orderly world. That night the boy wakes up from a bad dream but he won’t tell the man about it, except that in it he was crying and the man wouldn’t wake up.

They sleep in a shed, listening to the rain, and the boy asks the man if there are other “good guys.” The man says that there are, but that they’re all hiding from each other. He is afraid the boy doesn’t believe him sometimes, but the boy says he always believes the man – he has to.

The next day they enter a small town and are confronted by three men holding lengths of pipe. The man raises the pistol, trying to look tough, and the men slink away. The man and the boy keep going and eventually they make camp. The man is feverish when he wakes up the next morning, and the boy worries that he will die. The man has fever dreams about his dead family members, a cat, and books. The fever lasts for four days, and then the man wakes up and goes out to a hill and looks into the empty blackness.

The man remembers when he was a child standing with a group of men digging a hole to expose a huge nest of serpents. The men poured gasoline on the snakes and burned them, “having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.” After the snakes writhed silently to death the men dispersed without speaking.