Part 1
- Pathetic Fallacy
- The imagery of deterioration of an aspect of the father’s past
- The imagery of the deterioration of a man-made structure, apart from a house
- The syntactic shift from a longer sentence to a very short one
- The symbol for innocence other than the boy
- The symbol for the illusion of power/protection over life and death
- Simile (“When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.”)
- Symbol of a difficult journey
- The motif of ashes (two quotes needed to establish a motif)
- The motif of light/warmth (two quotes needed to establish a motif)
Part Two: Evidence to suggest that
- The world contains people who have lost the importance of human compassion
- Something we take for granted in our everyday lives is seen as having deteriorated
- Even the sun, often a symbol for the hope of emotional direction, is described in a negative light.
- There is something more important than food in this difficult world
- God is mentioned, which reflects a desire to be connected to something larger than oneself
- The father is conflicted emotionally
- The duo finds sanctuary in the natural world
- The mother was worried about what would happen to the man (or boy) in this new world
- The son acts as a source of emotional or moral strength for the father
- The father is more physically or emotionally vulnerable than he lets on