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First of all, I'm a mom to a bunch of kids. I read Pear S. Buck's, The Good Earth as a high school student, and then later as a mom and was struck by the quiet resignation to the reality of not being able to protect her baby. When I read The Road, I felt that same resignation - and now as a parent, it struck me to the core, I could totally imagine the absolute need to continue on and at the same time, the near futility of making the effort (the mom's suicide).
From the quote in a previous message:
The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. ... It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.
I am still haunted by the imagery - I feel it to my core. It's like my deepest secret fear laid out in a book.
I read Alas Babylon as a teen and then again as an adult - and it was so much more focused on how to survive the catastrophe. The Road made the catastrophe unimportant - you just needed to know that there was so little hope. I kept imagining how my children would simply die - no amount of resourcefulness could keep them alive because there simply weren't any resources - just bleak, gray cold.
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