Loss of Innocence

Section 6 of The Road by Cormac McCarthy is, mostly, about the loss of innocence of a child, more specifically ‘the boy’. The story is about a father and his son in a post-apocalyptic world, they focus on surviving each day and have no other goal or reason to do so; they keep living because they have to. An innocent kid who knows nothing about everything, a kid who is constantly scared and awaiting death in the world they live in. It was meant to take this boy’s innocence. They live in a corrupted world, people desperate enough to turn others into food, nobody knows any better because there is no other way of survival. The question is, what caused the boy to lose his ingenuity from night to day? Cannibalism was the reason. It was something the boy knew existed, but this time it was coming for him. Going into a house with untouched windows is already a warning sign, looking around this place for food to satiate their hunger is what got them in trouble. The thing is, they found food, just not the kind they were searching for, they found naked and burnt human bodies, living human bodies, all asking for help but the ones who had done this were just upstairs, arriving for dinner. 

What differentiates these two characters from the rest is their morality. Even with all that has happened, they both have morals and know right from wrong, unlike the rest of humanity. The boy is just a kid, and as a kid he wants to help people who are unassistable, and witnessing such a scene is enough for him to realize that he is incapable, he is incapable because he lives in a world of eat or be eaten. The boy had to learn this the hard way and, after all the horrible things he had to face because of it, his innocence got taken away. 

After escaping their nightmares and surviving the horrors of that house, they found a shelter. A place with food and bunk beds and mattresses and blankets, even a stove. When they settle for the night the man, the boy’s father, feels like something is gone and it’s never coming back: “But when he bent to see into the boy’s face under the hood of the blanket he very much feared that something was gone that could not be put right again” (McCarthy 136). Whatever the father felt was missing from his son, whatever he just lost, was his innocence. No person can be kept from harm’s way in their world; therefore, no person can be innocent for long enough, there’s no exemption. Throughout the chapter there are more signs and hints of this happening, along with the obvious signs of trauma both, the man and the boy, have. When they first discovered their shelter, the boy was scared of going in and finding the same result as last time– enslaved, naked people, about to be eaten and begging for help.– He is constantly scared and hiding from the world, and the mentions of the death he wishes for just add more to his depression. The man is no different, he has flashbacks of his old life, he hates his dreams, he hates remembering things that are no longer there, like his wife. He lives in denial and faces it at the same time, and with all that he has seen and lived, all he has left is his son and his faith. 

Both characters need the other to survive, it’s their only reason to, this section of the book shows it as well as the rest. The way they depend on each other to keep going shows that they’re each other’s worlds. But with the man sick and dying, everyday weakening, we don’t know how much longer this will last. Because without the man, the boy is doomed to fail and end without a life to care for. The boy loses his innocence through his travels on the road, he has to lose it to survive because his naiveness will not help him more than harm him.