Coming across the man who has been struck by lightning (pp. 50-53)

The existence of the man is first alluded to on page fifty as the man notices the sudden appearance of human tracks, when queried on his existence by the Boy the man replies 'Who is anybody?' which sets the tone of the state of human affairs in the world is The Road by inferring that everybody is nobody to them, and that anybody could be anyone. Suggesting by this that by this point the world has descended into such an unredeemable state of entropy that the normal functions and standards of society have corroded and the normal rules of human expectation no longer apply. The lack of trust and the wariness of the Man for the rest of humanity here tells the reader that humans in this world are capable of any means by which they'll survive: murder, betrayal, theft etc. and of the Man's outlook that even those you know can become someone else in this world which was revealed to him brutally in the suicide of his wife. The devastating effect the apocalypse had on humanity triggered a transformation from human to survivor which left humans are unknown species to each other, as the Man states 'Who is anybody?' in a world where humanity has decayed and rotted in the ashed of the fire.

The Man's perception of other humans in this section is contrasted  with the The Boy's unrelenting will to help others as he repeatedly implores his father to help the man, 'pulling at his coat' asking 'cant we help him' even when it is as the Man says 'There's nothing to be done for him'. This characterises the Boy for possessing an all-enduring hope which in This Road is something almost alien, unbelonging, and possessed by a Boy who is alien to this world.

The man struck by lightning himself is symbolic of the calamitous fallout of the apocalypse on humanity in The Road who was 'as burnt looking as the country' representing the effect of the apocalypse burning out humanity and leaving them ruined and vulnerable to the new world where only the ruthless survive as survival cannot exist in the same place as humanity. McCarthy presents Survival and Humanity as binary oppositions which cannot prosper in the presence of the other and empitomises the two absoultes in the characters of the Man and the Boy thus creating as paradox in the beauty and innocence of their relationship in the novel by allowing the two, survival -the Man- and humanity -the Boy- to work together to survive as the Man allows the Boy to survive and the Boy keeps the man alive. The man's attempts to throw away his humanity -in this section as he leaves personal posessions 'His driver's license. A picture of his wife' laid 'down in the road...then he stood and they went on'- represent the concept of survival vs. humanity as the character himself believes that humanity cannot exist inside of him if he wants to survive, but the fact that it is the Boy that he is surviving, shedding his humanity for, contradicts these actions as while he still wants to keep the Boy alive, he will always possess some humanity, as to survive optimally he would have to leave the Boy, who keeps him alive and his humanity intact. This paradox brings to light McCarthy's Post-Modernism in the rejecting of two binary oppositions as absolutes which can't exist together and in the combining of literature genres Post-Apocalyptic and Post-Modern as well as Dystopian.

Fire and Ice

"Some say the world will end in fire,

   Some say in ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

   But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

    To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

   And would suffice."

-Robert Frost