What's Your Fire?

     The father and son continue to travel to the shore, and it is said that they are "carrying the fire." Our group has interpreted the "fire" as the will to keep on going to keep on living. It's the want to survive. It can be argued that survival is considered their purpose in life in the book. 

     What is my fire? What keeps me going? I'd have to say that I believe something great will happen in the future, and I just have to wait for it. I'm going to college in a couple months, and I have the rest of my life ahead of me. I have so much to learn and experience. Education is very important to me, and I'm going to Boston for college. I'll be in a new city, and I'll be studying for a major that's all about learning more. I'm majoring in pharmacy, and new medication is always being worked on. It's more to learn. There is so much ahead of me right now that I want to keep going to experience it all.

What would you do to survive?

     The Road is about a father and son traveling south down the road in the hopes of getting to a warm place for the next winter. The pair hardly come in contact with any other people while traveling down the road, but they do meet a few people. By "meet" I mean they hid and tried to put as much distance between them and the strangers as possible. The people who have managed to still live in this post-apocalyptic have gone to the extremes to ensure their survival. Cannibalism is seen more than once by the father and son. The first instance was when they stopped in a house off the road hoping to find some food. The father breaks open a hatch in the floor thinking food will be down there because it was locked up. Instead he found people down there, one with no body beyond the hips. These people were being kept there to be eaten later. Later in the book, the father and son come across a fire that some people ahead of them had started and left. They found and infant on the spit over the fire being cooked when they got close enough to see it.
     Another common thing is that the reader can imply that many of the corpses the father and son come across are the result of suicide. Many people chose to end their own life rather than live in the horrible post-apocalyptic world. I assume that is what the mother did when she left her husband and son. She said something along the lines of the husband just denying the inevitable death of him and their son. She also said something along the lines of that she should have left when there were more than two bullets left. The reader initially wants to condemn the mother's decision to leave, but can her decision be justified? What would we do in that situation?
     If I was living in a post-apocalyptic world, I don't think I would make the decision to leave my family. I would like to think that I would not commit suicide. I've always been one to tough things out and deal with it, but would something this tragic and life-altering be enough to finally push me over the edge? Would I resort to eating another human being if my life depended on it? I would like to think I wouldn't. I hope I wouldn't, but I simply cannot accurately predict what I would do in that situation.