9/16/19 Katrina Chung PD1

Aim: How does The Road strive to enchant its readers through survival?

Do Now: If you had no idea when you would eat again, what would your last meal consist of?

For this do now, the question is basically asking what your favorite food is. Many people talked about how they would eat more fiber or energy-producing foods. When starvation surfaces and you are given a choice to eat whatever you want, people tend to lean towards foods they have emotional attachments to. It may be your last time to eat it so those types of food become more sentimental. 

After the do now, we talked about the Father's tone when he finds pears in the bunker. The Father feels relieved and happy when he finds the pears after a long period of starvation. Them finding the bunker shows that common household items, like a bed or toilet, and fruits had become a rarity they probably haven't experienced in a while. The bunker for them represents paradise. McCarthy relates this scene back to the Garden of Eden. Instead of using apples like in Eden, McCarthy uses pears. The Father and the Boy had to leave the bunker after a few days just like in the Garden of Eden. They had to continue their journey containing unhappiness and death. 

Then, we talked about gratitude. We first made a list of all the things we were grateful for in the last week and shared them out. Next, we talked about how the Boy reminded us of the necessity of gratitude. From the book, we can tell that the boy is very compassionate by always trying to help others who can potentially harm him and his father. 

Next, we revisited the conversation between the old man, the father, and the boy to determine if the father was right for being leery or if the child was right for wanting to share. The class talked about how both the man and the boy were correct in their own aspects. The old man was very suspicious and lying to the man did not help his case, but the man and the boy did have enough to share a little with the old man. The boy's compassion with the old man shows that there is still humanity left in the dead, post-apocalyptic world. It really makes you wonder if the man was just as compassionate as the boy before the apocalypse.

The lesson was summed up with the 'Rules of the Apocalypse.' Why must we keep moving to survive? If the man and the boy were to stay in the bunker, they are essentially giving up hope to continue with their goal of reaching the south. Them moving shows that they have somewhere to get to (even it was not definite), that they want to continue living, and that they are still full of hope to survive. 

Though today's lesson and class discussions, we learned about the ways the man and the boy survived through the apocalypse. We found out that they survived because of the man's perceptive outlook, the boy's compassion, and their need to keep on moving. 

And in the future, shall there be an apocalypse, you can survive if you are skeptical and at the same time compassionate while you continue moving.