The father character in the novel, The Road, is confronted with difficult decisions. These decisions include considering killing his son, shooting a man, exiting the food storage shelter after only a few days there, and others. These situations have hardened the man, and purged all hesitation from his heart. What drove him to kill the man who stole his supplies at the beach? The man was doing what any other starving person would have done. I believe that the father was not justified, but vengeful. The thief had no malicious intentions save stealing some food.
Truthfully, according to our standards, stealing from another would be considered heartless, and taking from a starving person would be cruel, but considering the standards of an apocalyptic world littered with cannibalistic savages, stealing some food without directly harming anyone is the most humane way to survive.
The father attempts to justify his action by saying that he wouldn't have murdered him, to which the son responds, "But we did kill him" (136). After this experience, I realized that the son's innocence demonstrated the father's increasing cruelty. There is a fine line between being cautious, and being paranoid. It is the son's duty to remain worried about ethics, while the father struggles to keep them alive by any means. While the father believes the son is simply tagging along as a liability, the son's task of kindling the "fire" is the more difficult job. The fact that this does not occur to the father makes the son's job all the more difficult.
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