Why did the author keep the man and the boy nameless throughout the novel?

To keep the man and the boy nameless through the novel was a tool that the author, Cormac McCarthy, uses to be able to have the reader identify with the situation and the characters more. He paints a very broad image that allows the reader to add their own comments and feelings to the reading. The dialogue between the man and the boy is very straightforward and simple and that simplicity allows the reader to add whatever emotion they felt would be necessary and in the end making it more personal.

I believe that the author decided to keep the man and the boy nameless through the novel because it makes it personal. As mentioned before, they carried the fire and what they saw their fire is different than what I saw as their fire as a reader and what my group members saw different in those same lines. Although we all read the book and the point of views in different ways we could all agree that the man's job was to keep the boy alive. By leaving the man and the boy nameless- an action that can often be seen as impersonal and detaching the author has achieved the opposite. By remaining nameless the characters became much more personal and easy to relate to. 

My Fire

The man and the boy, The Road's main characters always talk about carrying the fire. The fire, after much discussion with my classmates, was decided to be hope. The man knows they are slowly dying and that the warm weather that they are so fervently seeking is not coming to a realization. Their fire is the hope of finding something, anything, that helps their situation. They blindly keep moving, hoping to not get caught, hoping to find food, hoping to be able to live one more day. Their fire also represented the more literal sense of an actual fire- carrying warmth and therefore life with them. A person's fire can be argued to be the most important thing of them- it is what gives them a drive in their life and when a person's fire begins to dangerously flutter that is when someone should start to worry.

My fire is my desire to travel. All my career options and life plans rely on the idea of me studying, working and living abroad. My fire is knowing the unknown, and like the wood or coal that feeds a fire what feeds my fire is the different and the undiscovered (undiscovered by me of course). It might look like a simple idea, or an very 'young adult' thing to want to do but I am already taking steps into keeping my fire out and alive. I will be spending about 10-11 months living with a host family in Malaysia. Then I come back and spend two semesters abroad in Florence, Italy. If I am going to be living in two completely different countries within the next two years of my life, when I am not even 20 yet, where else will I be going? I think that to keep my fire going is to not be afraid, to just go ahead and do things and accept things and try out for things because taking the bold movement is almost always the best idea.

Survival

In the novel 'The Road' the father, or the man as he is often referred too, was confronted by his wife who accused him of refusing of recognizing the truth. The truth that she talked about was that it was a given fact that they would die and the only choice they had was to decide when they were going to die. Wait, be abused, be killed, and then be eaten or to just end it all yourself before things spiral out of control. She then decided to leave her family and just end it herself. This lead to the discussion in our group that asked of us, "What would you do to survive?" Would you be like the mother and decide that fighting and trying wasn't worth the effort because in the end it would result on death? Would you continue to suffer through your health and expose your child to danger and pain and traumatic events like the father? Or would you turn to cannibalism like many of the other survivors did?

After a lot of thought and consideration I would have followed the mother's step. Yes, it is giving up without trying and yes it can be considered the cowards way out but realizing that nothing can be done when the majority of the masses have turned against their humanity does bring a person down. It is cruel to keep on living with a small hope that you will survive when you struggle to find food, shelter and safety. Mistrust of others would plague the thoughts of everyone. The mother, as hard as it is to understand and to accept was right. Death was coming to them all and it would all depend on how long it would take them to realize that death wasn't avoidable.

If I am in a situation that I know my survival chance is 0 and that death is for sure coming, I would not wait for it if I knew that when it came looking for me it would be more painful.

An Open Letter to Parents (not my own)

Dear Parents,

I do appreciate everything you have done for me. I know raising a child is not easy but you have to realize that there will be a time were we will have to leave you guys. Don't make that harder for yourself, leaving does not mean forgetting you- it means becoming an independent person. I know it is a hard concept to understand but you did it to your parents and it is only natural we will do it to you too. This doesn't mean we don't love you, this doesn't mean we will forget about you, it only means we need to do our own thing for a while.

I also understand that you might not always agree with what we have done, but you always say "Learn from your mistakes" so why don't you relax and let me make those mistakes? You can't shield us from everything, it doesn't help anyone. Sometimes we might make you think that we don't appreciate you or don't love you but that isn't true. There are a lot of reasons we might act that way but the two major ones are a) we don't really know how to express it or b) you just caught us in a bad time. So don't take it to heart when we aren't the doting children everyone seems to have.

That brings me to my next note...take time off your schedules to spend time with us. Believe it or not we do enjoy spending time with you guys, it makes us feel like we do matter in your busy times. Show us affection  if you get upset when we don't show affection towards you imagine how it makes us feel? Ask us how our life is, how our day went, what we want, if we want to go out with you, or just make conversation. Especially once we get older, when we become less dependent on you, I figured we would all appreciate the bond and relationship not weakening because honestly we all need each other.

Sincerely,

Your Child.

Civics

What is civics? Civics is the study of or science of the privileges and obligations of citizens.

There is civic responsibility which are things we should do but are not required to do such as helping people in need, not loitering, and being respectful to others. Civic duties are things people have to do for their country such a voting and obeying laws. Both are things to make life for yourself and others better and more efficient.

Civics overall is the respect that everyone, not matter where they are from or where they live, should know and follow. One of my biggest pet peeves is when people do not respect others while they are talking. This includes interrupting someone who is speaking, ignoring a person who is speaking, or being loud and disruptive while someone is speaking. This means that the civic responsibility that I see to be most important is to listen and respect people while they are speaking. You might disagree with them, or they may be saying the stupidest thing you have ever heard but you should not rude enough to start talking while they are halfway through their thoughts.

So do not interrupt someone else while they speak, it is rude and disrespectful. And it just creates a mess. Wait for people to finish their thoughts before starting your own. No one likes to be cut off halfway through a sentence, so why do you do it to others?

Is Being Poor a Choice?

This is a hard question to tackle and a hard question to take a stand. Defining what poor is much harder than answering the question. Each person who is asked what their definition of poor is will have different answers. There is the blue-collared worker who only saves a few dollars from their pay check, or the single-parent working day and night, sick or not to keep their kids fed. Over all poor goes a long ways in what it is and in the end it all comes to the question- is it a choice?

I believe being poor is a conscious decision, sometimes it does not have to be blatantly obvious; sometimes to be poor you don't have to be living in a shack. Sometimes you can be living in deplorable conditions but you make the effort to make the best of your situation. You don't blame the government or other people for your troubles, you accept the responsibility that has fallen on you. You decide to get up each morning and work your hardest to provide for yourself and for your family, so they can be proud of what they have. Being poor is a choice, you can choose to blame everyone else but yourself for your problems. By blaming others you end up blinding yourself, refusing to seek help because you don't believe others care. If you don't care for yourself what will make others care for you?

This country does a good job in providing for the homeless and the needy. Although it might not be the best model of social welfare available, at least there is concern for the people who need it. We live in a country were the hardships and challenges between people are inevitable, and instead of turning an eye to this blatant inequality there are others trying to help those people who end up in the 'losing' end of the scale. The point being stressed here is that there are choices people can take. There is help that the people who end up being poor can take. Life is full of making decisions and choices and the moment when a person decides to give up and refuse to actively go seek help to better their living conditions, then that is when I say you are poor.

Living does not mean having all of the luxuries in life. Being poor does not mean not being able to afford. Being poor means not taking responsibility for your life and your family. For hoping others will pity you and drag you along. Being poor means being a burden to yourself.  There is a huge amount of respect for single-working parents who break their backs working for their children, those people are not poor. Those people try their hardest to give something better for their kids. There is an enormous amount of respect to people who don't give up when things get rough. I agree, sometimes things are hard and there seems to be no hope but you won't be seen as poor until the day you decide to give up with your life and not only harm your own being but you begin to harm and drag down others with you.

Being poor is hard, to be seen as poor is hard but there are always ways to improve their situations.

Thoughts on X

White: not intended to cause harm, favorable, fortunate.
Black: thoroughly sinister or evil, dirty or soiled.

While reading Chapter 10 Satan, Malcolm X goes to explain how he copied every word in the dictionary and improved his penmanship and extended his vocabulary. After he explained this, he went into detail about what Elijah Mohammad and the Nation of Islam preached about. They said that the "white man is evil." During class a few days ago, we looked up the definitions of white and black , besides pointing out the obvious (pigmentation and colors) we discovered that even in Webster's dictionary there was evil, pureness, harmless and harmful associated with the definition. White is not intended to cause harm, it is favorable and fortunate while black represents dirty, soil, being sinister, being evil. This fact got me thinking that perhaps the reason they argued for the evilness of the white man was to have something to fall on, a way to disprove what was common knowledge. If the black man managed to disprove the dictionary and conventional definitions then maybe what they preached and spread out was true. If people began to question the stated definition people would be less skeptical of this new way of thinking.
After reading the definitions I realized that I wasn't shocked at seeing these connotations to the words, they were things than I had heard around and were even thought to me. People with white skin can be horrendous but just because they are white people are less distrustful of them. A person with a darker skin tone is often looked at with caution and brings up a feeling of distrust. While coming home one day I was looking at how people behaved at the train station. When the station was empty with a few people waiting for their respective trains, women and anyone really, tended to drift towards white men. Standing near them or around them while they moved away from any young black men I saw at the station. I had never put much thought into this before until I remembered the class's conversation. Maybe subconsciously people behave this way because they do associate the colors and coloration of peoples skins with the basic understanding that white is good and black is evil.
Although we are in a more open society there are still those views ingrained in a majority of people. I believe it is wrong, that evil can come in a variety of shapes and colors and it is not something that can be easily defined. I do not agree with the Nation of Islam and their views towards whites. And I do not agree with the white's opinions of colored people. I also do not agree with how people react to skin color but sadly and realistically speaking that won't ever change and it is not only blacks now that are seen as 'evil' and 'dangerous' but middle eastern people and many others who are not 'white' or Caucasian.