The Woman

Memories of the woman always surface in 'The Road'  when the man feels that he and the boy are close to death which speaks volumes about the role that she plays in the novel and what she represents as a character. Before she commits suicide we are presented with the woman's unique relationship with death. From the beginning of the apocalypse death becomes a companion that survivors live with, but rather than the hatred and grief that is usually regarded to with death, the woman begins to feel for death what she feels for her husband. Her love and hope for death grows day by day of survival eventually becoming as strong as her love for the man, overcoming it; as the man is her primary reason for survival this means that she hasn't got anything to live for anymore when death seems so close and comforting to her. This relationship with death explains her regarding her heart as 'whorish' and death as a 'lover' because she feels like each day she lives with death she is cheating on her husband; she become torn between her want for death and her love for the man and the boy.

It is known from one of the first mention of the woman that she will not survive the apocalypse because she doesn't understand survival. From the beginning of the apocalypse when the man fills the bath it it made clear that she doesn't understand what he is doing and why ('why are you taking a bath?') which suggests that she doesn't understand survival, foreshadowing how she ends up killing herself. Furthermore, her reasons for survival are shown not to be strong enough to keep her alive. She says 'you won't survive for yourself' implying that the man will never stay alive for himself but for somebody else (the boy). Whilst this is a stab in the gut for the man - as the woman is telling him that he and the boy are not a good enough reason for her- this suggests that the woman is not cut out for survival; that she is weak and cold. However she is strong-willed, as she finally decides that she will kill herself and be done, not allowing for any persuasion from the man or any temptation into living. This shows the difference in character of the man and the woman as throughout the novel the man is tempted by death, in his dreams and in his thoughts, whilst on the other hand the woman here is presented to be tempted by life and living.

In all but one of the memories of the woman she is described using a lexicon of ice and cold which creates the impression of the woman being coldhearted in contrast to the heat and warmth that a love would usually be described with. The semantic field that these words create connotes a cold, icy and sharp characterisation, contrasted with the heat and fire that destroyed the world. This gives the impression that the fires turned the woman cold, foreshadowing that she will not survive the apocalypse because as she represents ice, the fire that burnt the world will melt the ice. Adding to this, in the woman's end the man describes 'she was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift' which suggests that she teaches the man to abandon his humanity as she gives him a reason to hare and let go; a reason to darken his beautiful memories of her and forever forget his past, because the man feels that his memories are holding him back from survival. His resist of memories brings the impression that this is not the time for living, but the time for surviving because the world he's remembering, the world in his memories don't belong here with him.