A Mothers Love?

 Throughout the whole book we get to know the dad and his son, and how they: survive, eat and generally survive.  But, most of all, we see the love the dad has for the boy that he is willing to do right about anything for him. Even die.  But, where is the mom? This is the incessant question we keep asking ourselves.

 Conventionally, people expect the mom to be the person who is willing to give her all for the child. This is why we automatically speculate she had a terrible fate and probably died, making her unable to accompany her son in the fight for survival. We believe this until McCarthy tells us: “I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two.”(28) In this passage McCarthy is revealing to us the wife’s real wishes, not the idea we had of her, of self-destruction she had. Unhappy with the life they were leading she refused to keep on, not even for her son. McCarthy continues: “I was stupid. We’ve been over all of this.”(28) As we keep our voyage through the wife’s thoughts we understand they had considered ending with own life’s before, but they were unable to do it and now she feels as if the was dragged into a life she would’ve never wished for herself.

  We discussed in class that this book is an allegory, in which objects, persons and actions represent ideas outside of the story. I think that he mom actually represents the opposite of an idea coming from outside the text. The mom’s character defies the idea of a mother’s love that we all have engraved in our minds.