In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the boy undergoes several changes from the beginning to section 6. He loses his innocence, signifying the passage of time and how the awful things they see affect the boy and the man.
The boy shows the loss of innocence when he tells his father that he threw a
way the flute he made him, “He stopped. What happened to your flute? / I threw it away. / You threw it away? / Yes. / Okay.” (McCarthy 159). The flute signified his child-like qualities and naiveté in the fact that he stays light-hearted in this time that he is starving and freezing. The fact that he threw away the flute shows how he fully grasped the weight of the situation they are in.
Another example of the boy losing his innocence is when he thanks the people who owned the bunker for the food: “Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldn’t eat it no matter how hungry we were.” (McCarthy 146). Here he is not only showing maturity in the fact that he thanked people for the things he received, but he also states it as if he was saying grace to God, showing maturity in recognizing a blessing given to him.
The boy in the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy grows significantly from the beginning of the book, with purity and innocence, to section 6, where he matures and realizes his place in the world.
Out of all my writing this year, I was most proud of this. As in-class essays are hard for me, I never expect to do well on them; this one especially since it is so short. I ended up doing really well on it, my first, albeit the last one, in-class I ever did well on.
Hadwin, you made an effective point in the second to last paragraph that the boy’s loss of innocence wasn’t simply about acknowledging evil in the world or throwing away childish playthings, but the act of saying grace and recognizing a blessing is a specifically adult attitude. I liked the image you chose and the clarity and confidence of your voice in this piece.