Nothing is more hopeless than an apocalypse. Or so it might seem.
In its original sense, apocalypse means “revelation.” The word later came to be associated with an end-of-the-world cataclysmic event because of the link John’s Revelation in the Bible makes between revelation and the end of this world.1 The utter destruction of the world as we know it, and with it the “dismantling of perceived realities,”2 can, paradoxically, point us to hope. In revealing our present condition, traditional, religious apocalyptic literature directs our future hope. In a religiously based apocalypse, “the suffering and pain we encounter in this life gains meaning” and “hope is restored.”3
But what about a secular apocalypse such as Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, which depicts a world devoid of religion and nearly all reference to God? Modern apocalyptic literature, which is largely secular apocalyptic literature, demonstrates the truth about the modern condition: because we have replaced God with ourselves as the source of meaning and the center of the universe, “all we see on the horizon is our end.”4
Apocalyptic stories, whether in the form of novels, film, or television, have experienced a resurgence in recent years. On the publication of The Road in 2006, one news story explained the rise of this genre: “The world feels more precariously perched on the lip of the abyss than ever, and facing those fears through fiction helps us deal with it. These stories are cathartic as well as cautionary. But they also reaffirm why we struggle to keep our world together in the first place. By imagining what it’s like to lose everything, we can value what we have.”5 Of course, “what we have” is, too often, not enough. The Road, perhaps accidentally, reveals this very thing, even as a secular apocalypse.
To be human is to be “in the state of being on the way,”6 which is a kind of hope. From Homer’s Odyssey to Dante’s Divine Comedy to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the journey is one of the oldest and most prevalent motifs in literature. Hope has been called “the virtue of the wayfarer,”7 and The Road is the simple, but harrowing, story of a father and son who are wayfarers in a postapocalyptic world bereft of nearly all life. Few people remain, and because some of those who have survived are evil to the point of cannibalism, strangers the two chance upon cannot be easily trusted. Most land is burned and covered with gray ash from some unnamed catastrophic event. Food, shelter, and supplies are difficult to come by. Their journey participates in the accumulated symbolism of all the journeys throughout the canon of literature, much of it profoundly religious. Indeed, early in the story, the father and son are likened to “pilgrims in a fable.”8 Later in the story they are said to be “like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep.”9
Even the form of the book—a continuous narrative with no chapters, only occasional and sporadic breaks—reflects the meandering shape of a journey whose end is unknown. The sparse, minimalist prose, lacking even much punctuation, mimics the stark reality of the story’s world. The father and son are never even named, called by the narrator simply “the man” and “the boy” (although the boy calls his father “Papa”).
Such a place seems unlikely to cultivate hope. But sometimes in circumstances that seem most hopeless, hope is by necessity strengthened. Reading the story is itself an exercise in hope, similar to what one might experience reading any book of good repute, to be sure, but heightened even more by the lack of structural and narrative touchstones readers expect in modern-day novels.
Indeed, literary reading—reading that makes on the reader more demands of time, attention, and thought than casual reading—requires the same conditions that Aquinas finds in hope. The four conditions of hope are that it regards something good in the future that is difficult but possible to obtain. The practice of hope, Aquinas says, is “a certain stretching out of the appetite towards good.”10
This notion of stretching out the appetite is evocative. First, to be human is to have natural appetites and, as seen in chapter 2, necessitates the virtue of temperance. For, while the existence of those appetites is a given, the form and direction they take is not necessarily so. These appetites express what James K. A. Smith calls our “bodily orientation to the world,” and that orientation is shaped by our practices and our loves.11 The journey of the man and the boy in The Road is excruciatingly bodily. Second, the word stretch (notice its bodily meaning) implies a degree of discipline and sacrifice that is missing when hope is used synonymously with a word like wish. To wish is not to hope. A wish is not a virtue. Hope is.
HOPE AS PASSION AND HOPE AS VIRTUE
To say that hope is a virtue does not paint the full picture, though. Aquinas identifies two kinds of hope, and the difference between them (as well as their relatedness) illuminates my reading of The Road.
The first sort of hope is one common to all human experience. It’s a sense of anticipation for a future outcome: “I hope it snows tomorrow” or “I hope to be in France next summer” or “I hope I do well on this exam.” Such hope is a natural passion, one that even animals exhibit, as when, Aquinas points out, a dog chases a hawk or hare.12 “In its basic form,” Aquinas explains, “human hope does not differ essentially from animal hope.”13 In both human beings and in animals this natural hope arises either out of experience or by teaching and persuasion.14
But the hope that is a theological virtue, the hope spoken of in the Bible that is regarded as akin to faith and love (1 Cor. 13:13), is not a natural passion but a supernatural gift conferred by God. This virtue of hope cannot be understood apart from God. It is supernatural in both origin and sustenance, the gift of grace, not the result of mere human effort, although the Christian’s careful cultivation of hope may, like the exercise of all virtues, bring about its increase. Theological hope “is a steadfast turning toward the true fulfillment of man’s nature, that is, toward good, only when it has its source in the reality of grace in man and is directed toward supernatural happiness in God.”15 As with all spiritual gifts, its source can be nourished or quenched.16 Thus, while it originates in God, theological hope is a “habit of the will.”17
Both the natural passion of hope and the theological virtue of hope share the same object: “the future good that is difficult but possible to attain.”18 So while both God and theological hope are nearly absent from The Road, this object is ever present.
The man and the boy are the embodiment of natural hope. But we see hopelessness early in the story when it is revealed that at some point before the narrative begins the boy’s mother took her own life. She feared (reasonably) that she and the boy would be caught, raped, killed, and eaten by the marauders. She told the man, “As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.”19 She stole away one night, leaving him and the boy in order to die, at her own hands, “alone somewhere in the dark.”20 She was, in truth, hopeless.
TWO KINDS OF HOPELESSNESS
There are two kinds of hopelessness: presumption and despair. Presumption (or false hope) assumes that one’s hope will be fulfilled; despair anticipates that one’s hope will never be fulfilled. Both presumption and despair “are in conflict with the truth of reality.”21 Both “destroy the pilgrim character of human existence.”22 We can presume or despair in many areas of life, whether about our jobs, our relationships, or our future. I have observed anecdotally that despair is often rooted in unrealistic expectations or idealism, the kind of thinking that inevitably brings disappointment. People quit relationships, jobs, and churches over unmet expectations, often expectations that were never fair or realistic in the first place. In The Road, one way the man is able to keep up his hope, despite his natural moments of despair, is by being realistic. Of course, a realistic outlook in a postapocalyptic world is pretty dim. But the human spirit is amazingly resilient and adaptable. All across the world and history, people live, or have lived, with joy in conditions that other people find unimaginable.
Within a theological context, the vices of despair and presumption concern our posture toward God’s ability and willingness to forgive sin. To presume forgiveness is a sin against God in his justice.23 Aquinas says, however, that the sin of presumption is “less grave than despair”24 because to despair is a sin against God in his goodness and mercy.25
Of course, we need not turn to apocalyptic literature to encounter grave despair. Not only is despair a vice in itself, but it can lead to further wrongs, such as choosing the pragmatism of quick fixes rather than sticking to the principle of faithfulness over the long term. I think, for example, of the despair that has characterized the political landscape of America of late, particularly within some parts of the Christian community. Despair has encouraged some to place more faith in political leaders than in biblical principles. In turn, some Christians, disillusioned over what other believers have said or done, have chosen to disavow their family of faith, giving in to despair. To despair over politics—regardless of which side of the political divide one lands on—as many Christians have done in the current apocalyptic political climate, is to forget that we are but wayfarers in this land. Choosing hope—whether amid the annihilation of the world or merely a political breakdown—is virtuous.
In The Road, the boy’s mother despairs. His father, rather than despairing over his failure to save the woman, steels his determination to save the boy and chooses hope. The “child [becomes] his warrant,”26 his prompt, demonstrating Aquinas’s observation that hope gives birth to love and activity.27
In so far, then, as hope regards the good we hope to get, it is caused by love: since we do not hope save for that which we desire and love. But in so far as hope regards one through whom something becomes possible to us, love is caused by hope, and not vice versa. Because by the very fact that we hope that good will accrue to us through someone, we are moved towards him as to our own good; and thus we begin to love him. Whereas from the fact that we love someone we do not hope in him, except accidentally, that is, in so far as we think that he returns our love. Wherefore the fact of being loved by another makes us hope in him; but our love for him is caused by the hope we have in him.28
What else but love, the fruit of hope, could fuel the fire of such an arduous action as survival in a postapocalyptic world?
A STORY OF LOVE
Indeed, before it is a story of hope, The Road is a story of love: the love of a father for a son. Love contributes to the attainment of a difficult object, Aquinas explains, because “it happens sometimes that what is difficult becomes possible to us, not through ourselves but through others; hence it is that hope regards also that by which something becomes possible to us.”29
Hope is characterized by “quiet confidence,”30 a quality the man embodies throughout the story. When the novel opens, the two have already set out toward a warmer clime and the sea, not knowing what might lie before them there or anywhere else. After one brush with danger, the man gently reassures the boy, “I know you thought we were going to die. . . . But we didnt.”31 They travel for months along burned-out highways, sleeping in woods or abandoned homes, carrying whatever stores they can find in an old shopping cart. They seem to be alone in the world. Yet, the man promises the boy, “There are people. There are people and we’ll find them. You’ll see.”32
And there are people, they soon see. But they are not necessarily good people.
As in most postapocalyptic worlds, there are only “good guys” and “bad guys.” The man tells the boy they have to be vigilant, especially if they hope to find more of “the good guys.” But the bad guys are very, very bad. In order to survive, they eat people. And worse. The man and the boy are among the good. The father reassures the boy of this as often as he warns him of the other.
We’re going to be okay, arent we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That’s right.
Because we’re carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.33
The man never tells the boy (nor does the narrator tell the reader) what “carrying the fire” means. It needs no explanation.
The fire they are carrying is what makes them good guys. It entails hope. “This is what the good guys do,” the father tells the boy. “They keep trying. They dont give up.”34 Hope is “a desire for something good in the future,” as well as “the thing in the future that we desire” and “the basis or reason for thinking that our desire may indeed be fulfilled.”35 Because hope is oriented toward the future, it is, in a certain way, “the basis of morality,”36 since moral choices incur future consequences. The direness of the pair’s situation transforms decisions that would be otherwise ordinary or inconsequential into profoundly moral ones, beginning with the decision to embark on the road.
When the boy asks, “Are we going to die?” the man answers, “Sometime. Not now.”37 But as they continue to struggle to find food, take shelter, fight illness, and avoid the bad guys, the boy continues to be afraid. The man tells the boy, “Dont lose heart. . . . We’ll be all right.”38 When the boy is scared because of his dreams, the man exhorts him not to give in to fears and not to give up. “I wont let you,” he says.39 Over and over, the man tells the boy, “It will be okay.” The boy begins to echo the man’s word, saying, “It’s okay.”40
So, as they journey, the boy grows and matures. When his father admonishes him to stop crying, he says, “I’m trying.” And he is trying. When his father tells him that he (the boy) is not the one who has to worry about everything, the boy tells him, “Yes I am. . . . I am the one.”41 The man is surprised when the boy asks, “What are our long term goals?” and asks him where he heard the phrase. Finally, the boy remembers: “You said it. . . . A long time ago.”42
AGAINST ALL HOPES
Despite the hope that prevails, the man does, understandably, slip into moments of “numbness” and “dull despair.”43 Despair “responds to the difficulty of the good by pulling back or falling off,”44 and this is the temptation the man fights against every day, every hour. “There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead,” the story says.45 “What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake” in fear.46 The man senses the “world shrinking,” the “names of things slowly following those things into oblivion” as his grasp on the former world fades: “Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality.”47 One day, after the man’s leg is pierced by an enemy’s arrow, the boy asks him, “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?” The man answers, “Getting up this morning.”48
Despite his assurances to the boy that they will not die, the man is convinced at one point that “death was finally upon them” and considers ceasing their journey in order to find a place to hide and die.49 But they press on. After they later stumble upon an underground bunker filled with food and supplies, where they get cleaned, rested, and refreshed, the man recognizes the fault in his despair. “He’d been ready to die and now he wasnt going to and he had to think about that.”50
Hope is not the same as oblivion or naiveté. Hope requires reckoning with the world as it is, with reality. The man does this. When the boy asks the man if crows still exist, the man tells him it’s unlikely. And when the boy realizes that they have narrowly escaped being cannibalized, his father does not deny this horrific truth, as well as the fact that they couldn’t help other soon-to-be victims because then they’d be eaten too. Being reasonable is one of the man’s most prominent characteristics. He remains watchful all the time on the road. When the boy asks if he’s scared, he says, “Well. I suppose you have to be scared enough to be on the lookout in the first place. To be cautious. Watchful.”51
Watchfulness is part of hope. Watchfulness counters both despair and sloth, which is the “beginning and root of despair” and inhibits “courage for the great things.”52 Sloth is considered a capital sin because it prevents a person from becoming what God wants her to be and who she truly is.53
One counter to sloth is magnanimity, greatness of soul. Despair cannot be conquered by effort alone but must be accompanied by a “clear-sighted magnanimity that courageously expects and has confidence in the greatness of its nature.”54 Magnanimity perfects natural hope.55 Like all virtues, magnanimity is acquired and is a habit to be cultivated. Its object is “the doing of great things.”56 The man in The Road exemplifies well how “the magnanimous [person] aspires to greatness, and so pushes through difficulty towards a great good.”57 Keeping himself and the boy alive is the great thing the man hopes to obtain. But as a counterbalance, the virtue of magnanimity must also be accompanied by humility. Magnanimity “requires humility, so that it truthfully estimates its own possibilities, rather than exaggerate them.”58 Hope is thus bordered on one extreme by magnanimity and on the other by humility. Magnanimity points to possibility while humility recognizes limitations.59 Hope is inherently humble.
HOPE AS PURSUIT OF THE GOOD
Pursuing the great good allows—or perhaps requires—appreciation of the other goods along the way. Both magnanimity and humility assist this. For even in a postapocalyptic world, goodness can be found. These moments of goodness are what turn an otherwise horrifying story into a work of beauty and power. The story is filled with—to use George Saunders’s phrase—“drops of goodness.”60
Even the word good appears over and over in the story. Good is such a wonderful word. A good word.
Some years ago, I noticed amid the grading of many papers (the plight of every English professor) how often the positive feedback I wrote on my students’ work consisted simply of the comment “good.” I contemplated varying that word with others. But then I realized that good is the best word. (It is certainly easy to write!) Once in a while, the word excellent might be warranted. But not often. We live in a society so obsessed with “the best” that good is seldom good enough. But good is good. It is very good. It is the way God characterized his own creation in Genesis.
Paradoxically, the bleak world of The Road is an affirmation, even a celebration, of what is good, all the more marvelous in a world with so little good seemingly left in it. Goodness, Vladimir Nabokov says in Lectures on Literature, “is something that is irrationally concrete.”61 The “supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole,” is the basis, Nabokov says, for the “irrational” belief, against all contrary facts, in the goodness of man.62 And the “capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril,” Nabokov explains, is how “we know the world to be good.”63
One of the most poignant scenes in The Road bears this out. Early in their journey, the man and the boy search for food in an abandoned supermarket. When the man retrieves a can of Coke from a toppled machine, he gives it to the boy, who has never seen such a thing.
What is it, Papa?
It’s a treat. For you.
What is it?
Here. Sit down.
The man opens the can and hands it, fizzing, to the boy, who drinks it. “It’s really good,” he says.
You have some, Papa.
I want you to drink it.
You have some.
The man takes the can, drinks a little, and hands it back to the boy, insisting he drink it as they sit awhile.64 Later, when the man and boy come across a refreshing waterfall where the boy can wash and swim too, the man encourages him: “You’re doing good, the man said. You’re doing good.”65 After finding some mushrooms in the woods they can eat, the boy asks if they are good. His father tells him to take a bite. “These are pretty good,” the boy says. When they make camp, the boy says, “This is a good place Papa.”66 The boy is concerned about a little boy he glimpsed on their travels. He asks his father who will find the boy if he is lost. “Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again.”67 The man constantly assures the boy that they are “the good guys.” And “we always will be.”68 Even though they are starving, they will not become like the cannibals they have run from. “No matter what,” the man reassures the worried boy. “Because we’re the good guys.”69
NATURAL HOPE AS A BRIDGE TO THEOLOGICAL HOPE
The hope seen in The Road is ultimately merely human hope, the natural passion that Aquinas says we share with the animals: the arduous pursuit of some good. Yet, while the passion of hope and the theological virtue of hope differ in both source and kind, they are not entirely unconnected.
Theological hope is an implicit surrender to the help of another—God—in obtaining a good. Theological hope requires a similar recognition of one’s own limitations as required by the natural passion of hope. The magnanimous seek greatness that is within their power based on a rational assessment of what is and is not within that power.70 The presumptuous, on the other hand, “habitually regard ourselves as capable of attaining through our own powers things that in fact are impossible without help from others. Untruthfully exaggerating our own capacities . . . we render ourselves unlikely (if not unable) to lean on the help of God.”71 Theological hope requires humility in the same way that the natural passion does. Having natural hope, philosopher Robert Miner explains, can prepare one for the supernatural hope that comes from God:
Why should we suppose that persons who lack the habit of aiming for the arduous good in earthly matters are nonetheless well prepared to attempt the most difficult of goods? There may be no logical impossibility. God can infuse the virtue of hope even in souls that have no prior discipline in aiming for the difficult good. But in the usual order of things, . . . things do not happen in this manner. Souls indifferent to the achievement of human things cannot be expected to exert themselves in divine things.72
Miner goes on to observe, “Those with flat souls will often be unable to discern goods beyond the most obvious of bodily pleasures.” Such people “perceive spiritual goods as tasteless or insignificant,” leaving “no room in the soul” for the virtuous hope that comes only from God.73
Moreover, as N. T. Wright explains in Surprised by Hope, the theological virtue of hope is manifested not merely in eternity, but in the implications of eternity for present realities74—in other words, here and now in the relationship of the transcendent to the immanent. Only in the immanent can we as embodied creatures encounter transcendence. Transcendence meets human needs, one moral philosopher argues, only when understood “as a person—as a Thou.”75 Modern secular apocalypses—those that reveal a telos, or end, apart from the transcendent meaning and purpose—express even so a yearning “for Revelation—to make the deep pain and difficulties of our lives meaningful and finished.”76 In the absence of a “Thou,” the best a secular apocalypse can offer is a “thou.”
Once, while the boy is sleeping, the man watches over him, reflecting, “All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”77
Because transcendence requires “revelation and faith,”78 the desire for transcendence is, whether recognized as such or not, ultimately the desire for God. Despite the absence in The Road of religious faith—and, seemingly, God—something of transcendence is omnipresent nevertheless. Indeed, transcendence is the fuel, the fire itself, for the whole story and its entire journey. The world of the modern secular apocalypse offers something like the imaginary catastrophe Alasdair MacIntyre describes in the opening of After Virtue, one whose destruction leaves survivors trying to reassemble fragments of knowledge absent the traditions and structures that once gave the now decontextualized terms and facts coherence. In place of a “conceptual scheme” are only echoes of transcendence.79 Such an echo is seen in The Road during a snowfall. The boy catches a flake in his hand and watches “it expire there like the last host of christendom.”80
The hope the man has had all along—his hope in the boy and in the “fire” they carry—points to something more than natural hope, more than the hope of Aquinas’s dog in pursuit of the hare. The man’s hope allows him to succeed in the quest to reach the warmer clime and the sea. By the time he and the boy arrive there, the world as it is has taken its toll on the man. The illness that has been slowly overtaking him along the journey settles in. Knowing his life will soon end, the man passes on his natural hope to the boy. “You need to go on, he said. I cant go with you. You need to keep going. You dont know what might be down the road. We were always lucky. You’ll be lucky again. You’ll see. Just go. It’s all right.” But when the boy insists he can’t continue without his father, the man tells him,
You have to carry the fire.
I dont know how to.
Yes you do.
Is it real? The fire?
Yes it is.
Where is it? I dont know where it is.
Yes you do. It’s inside you. It was always there. I can see it.81
The man poignantly places his hopes for transcendence entirely in his son, declaring that “if he is not the word of God God never spoke.”82 Yet, even in his error in placing his hopes in the created rather than the Creator, the man seeks the sacred, and in so doing recognizes in his son the image of God: “He sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god. Please dont tell me how the story ends.”83
Hope is, like all virtues, a practice. It is autobiographical, the story of the one who possesses it, “stretching [that story] forward to its best possible ending.”84 Like the unity and direction of a good narrative—or a pilgrimage—hope leads one to consider oneself within the context of one’s story, stretching it forward to its best possible ending. The man in possession of merely the hope that is a natural passion does not see the hope that comes only from God: participation in the new heaven and the new earth.
Neither The Road nor the man demonstrate theological hope directly. But in hinting at something beyond mere animal passion, at something transcendent, the work points toward a hope that surpasses even the best human pursuits.
THE MYTH OF PROGRESS
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes three senses of transcendence, three ways of reaching beyond the flatness of the here and now: through belief in God or some higher power, through the extension of natural or mortal life, and through agape love.85 Clearly, the man in The Road achieves at least this last kind of transcendence.
The man also resists secularity as Taylor defines it. One quality of secularity, according to Taylor, is that human flourishing becomes the highest good.86 Although a pilgrimage—whether literal religious travel or metaphorical spiritual journey—involves both linearity and change, it differs subtly but significantly from the modern idea of progress, the foundation for the secular notion of human flourishing. Postapocalyptic stories confront the myth of progress. Progress is not the same as hope. The modern idea of progress is founded on a belief in the perfectibility—or at least the unbounded improvability—of humankind. Progress is an Enlightenment idea, grounded in the obvious and measurable progress of science but erroneously applied to the human condition. This explains why the science that informs medicine improves over the ages but our poetry does not. Although human manners and morals shift and change, and human cultures exchange one systemic sin for another, human nature does not change, let alone progress. “Ironically, by affirming human powers, modern hope has constricted human imagination.”87
Among other shortcomings in its account of the nature of reality, the myth of progress cannot account for evil.88 Hope, however, takes evil into account. The “fundamental structures of hope” are built upon belief in the goodness of creation, the nature of evil, and the plan of redemption.89 Nowhere is evil more obvious than in suffering. The world of The Road is a world filled with suffering and the never-ending attempt to escape or minimize it—the very goal of the man and boy’s journey. Placing human suffering in a new and startling context shocks us into recognition of truths we often work hard to avoid.
Yet the doctrine of progress in the modern age does not make room for suffering. Rather, the notion of progress suggests “that the great evils heretofore experienced in history are passing phenomena, not enduring characteristics of human existence.”90 The entire project of progress, as noble as it is untenable, is to eliminate suffering. The Road demonstrates the impossibility of such an idea. Yet, in so doing, it demonstrates the triumph of hope. Hope exists only where there are obstacles to achieving the good, and the good that one seeks in hope is arduous.
Flourishing is another way of talking about the modern notion of progress, which cannot accommodate the problem of evil. No world other than the postapocalyptic one can depict more dramatically the limits of insistence on human flourishing. “Flourishing is good,” Taylor writes; “nevertheless, seeking it is not the ultimate goal” for the believer.91 God is the highest good for the Christian believer. Or goodness for another kind of believer.
The man in The Road is this other kind of believer. His reassurances to the boy that they will never become like the cannibals they must hide from shows the man’s recognition of goodness and transcendence, even in such a horrific world, for he would rather they die (not flourish) than become that evil.
And if we accept the central metaphor of the story—carrying the fire—then we see that, after the man’s death (but even before), the boy does carry it forward and, in so doing, extends in some way the man’s natural life. The boy’s sensitivity toward the transcendent is even stronger than the man’s. It is the boy who, in his innocence, seeks to help others that the man, in his greater experience, rejects out of fear. It is the boy who, when they stumble upon a great store of food in a safe bunker underground, insists upon giving thanks—somehow, to someone—before they eat. Later, when they have reached their destination of the sea and they find a flare gun and the man explains its purpose to the boy—to show others where you are—the boy wonders if somebody “like God” might see it. “Yeah,” his father answers. “Maybe somebody like that.”92
Somebody like that does see the boy. After the father’s death, a family who has been watching them comes to the boy’s aid. They are a father, a mother, and two children. When the boy asks if they are “the good guys,” they assure him they are. And they are. They take him in.
And sometimes the woman—the mother—talks to the boy about God.