Rêves Apocalyptiques

Throughout The Road, there are many moments in which the father dreams. These dreams, are a tool McCarthy uses in order to expose several things and themes. In the dreams, the author incorporates various symbols in order for the reader to interpret them and understand the real meaning of the story. Although some of them may seem a little random (such as the one of the penguin), McCarthy is not actually crazy, but instead knows perfectly what he is doing.
One of these dreams the Father has is about his dead wife.
“dream” pg 58
Although in a literal level, we can see that this dream is of his wife and her death, there is much more to interpret from it. Here, we can see how she abandoned them and decided to commit suicide in order to stop the pain, but her absence still remains as a burden to them. Not only does she kill herself, but the way she does it shows how dehumanized she was. She could have used the gun to do this, but instead she decides to finish her life in the most primitive/savage way, with a rock.
Also, this dream infers how guilty the Father feels for this, since he was the one who told her to sharpen the rock. Now, his conscience is slowly torturing him, but there is no way back. His wife and he had contemplated the thought of suicide before, but while he had thought about it, she was already determined to end the pain, showing how desperation can take away interest and desire in life. In contrast, although he knows that death is the solution, he represents strength, hope and self determination for not giving up.
At first, I felt somehow traumatized by the idea of suicide, but then I realized that the mother doesn’t actually represent a person. The mother is not a physical person, who actually kills herself; she is really an allegory for Mother Nature. In this way, McCarthy succeeds in representing Mother Nature through a women and showing how humans destroyed her. Now, after this dream I finally understand that the author is really writing about en environmental destruction. It may seem a little too far away from our reality, but it is not. We are destroying our environment and wasting resources, and although there are millions of indicators of this, we just don’t put a stop to our actions. It is not until something as the situation in the novel happens that we will realize how wrong we are. In this world there are limited resources, but unlimited wants. But we are humans, and we will never stop, until we see THE END.