Alternate Character Interpretation: Did the group who was roasting a baby on a spit breed that baby specifically to eat, or was the baby just stillborn and their devouring the corpse an unpremeditated act of desperation?
Esoteric Happy Ending: Both the novel and the film end with the boy being adopted by a benevolent and non-cannibalistic family, however just because the boy’s immediate protection and survival is no longer a problem, the issue remains that all he can hope for is to continue struggling to find ever-dwindling resources, and that’s if he is able to survive to adulthood. Not to mention the planet still seems to be steadily dying with no sign that what’s left of humanity is going to survive.
Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: The fact the line "carrying the fire" appears here and in No Country For Old Men hasn't gone unnoticed. One theory has it that The Road is a distant sequel to Old Men. Another theory is that everyone really is in Purgatory and that the boy is their savior.
Heartwarming Moments: The family at the end taking the Boy in after the death of his father, and even allowing the Boy to say goodbye and cover him up.
The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.
Inferred Holocaust: Pretty much one of the reasons why the ending is so bittersweet. Even though the boy is in good hands, the biosphere is almost certainly dead. If so, no one is going to live long once what is left of food is eaten and the remaining humans have all cannibalized each other.
Jerkass Woobie: The Man. What he's been through is undoubtedly tragic, and his health and mental stability are obviously in a state of decline. But he's a hypocrite who — for all his repeated insistence that he and the Boy are the "good guys" — fails to practice what he preaches, and it takes convincing from the Boy for him to actually bother to help anyone.
Lightning-struck man with a melted face sitting on the road and waiting to die.
The protagonist and his son enter a house, and the son keeps saying he doesn't want to go in. Then he opens a door and finds the people the bad guys have been eating... alive.
The protagonist later sees three men and a very pregnant woman. Three days after, he and his son pass through a camp that has the remains of a beheaded, roasted infant on a spit.
In one scene a woman and her child flee from a group of violent attackers. They are caught, and apparently murdered in cold blood.
One scene implies that the Man attempts to cook a meal by burning rat droppings.
After a bout of illness, the Man is described as "filthy with diarrhoea."
Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This is a post-apocalyptic wasteland scenario done in one of the bleakest ways possible. There's no cool mutants, glamorous violence, or badass cars, just relentless starvation and death and ashes. Though there are (rare) glimmers of hope, it's an unremittingly grim and brutal book.
The Woobie: The Boy. Imagine being a child with no real childhood to speak of, where every day of your life is a desperate fight for survival and the only person you have to look up to is your ailing father who — out of pragmatism — will refuse to make decisions that could potentially save the lives of others (or at least buy them time), despite your urging.
