Post-Apocalyptic Literature

Marauding Gangs of Bandits

The Gang of Road-Rats

'He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had 
the tattoo of a bird done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance.'
The gang of road rats represents the degree of the corruption and disintegration of society in The Road. This is a key concept which links to Post-Apocalyptic literature as it brings in the theme of violence to the novel whilst also setting the defining lines between the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys'. This section also gives us a key characterisation of the man by hinting at a background that involved these kind of dangerous situations on a regular basis.

The Gang in Haz-mats Suits

'An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. (. . .) The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. (. . .) Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illcothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. All passed on. They lay listening.'
This gang brings in a much more sinister theme to the novel and embodies what the man and boy call 'the bad guys' because this gang stand for the degradation of humanity in The Road. The 'dogcollars' represent the dehumanisation of the people being treated like slaves and speaks volumes about the degradation in this novels by the way these people are being treated like animals. This corruption, degradation and dehumanisation makes the novel fit into the post-apocalyptic literature genre as it represents how survival turns humanity savage and allows them to regress back to primitive behaviour without feeling any moral issues with the acts they are carrying out, because they think they are doing it to survive.