Ouch. The Boy's mother leaves without so much as a good-bye. We think this passage functions as a barometer of how bad things get in The Road. It's not that The Boy's mother is really cruel (OK, maybe she's a little cruel) but that the world now strikes her as incredibly hopeless. She chooses not to fight against that hopelessness. Of course, The Boy still has his father's love, but you can imagine the absence The Boy must feel because his mother leaves so suddenly.

The plot of The Road allows McCarthy to explore memory and the past in really startling ways. Don't we often feel guilty when we start to forget the face of someone we loved? Because the previous world has vanished in the novel, and because survival demands that one focus on the present, McCarthy has an opportunity to explore the guilt of forgetting concretely. Very concretely: the Man leaves a picture of his wife on the road. He then kneels in the ashes like a penitent. How much more concrete can you get? There are none of the abstract, big words here you might find in flightier explorations of memory. The loss of the past in The Road is universal and shared instead of being limited to the thoughts of one character.