Both Children of Men’s Britain and The Road’s wasteland exist under the same gray sky, worlds where the smoke of burning corpses is too often indistinguishable from the bleak horizon. Cuaron’s Theo heads for the coast hoping to find sanctuary. McCarthy’s protagonist, an unnamed father, also heads for the coast hoping that warmer temperatures will be more forgiving to him and his son. Theo and the unnamed father are kindred spirits. Both are just as lost as those they guide but feign competence nonetheless. Both perish at their destination, only for their respective wards, Kee and the unnamed boy, to continue without them. However, the most striking similarity between the two media is the abundant mention of faith and God. Faith is mentioned so frequently in these post-apocalyptic narratives that one starts to wonder if such name dropping isn’t to acknowledge the presence of God, but rather the lack thereof. They search so …show more content…
The father thinks grisly thoughts: of foul beasts in the darkness, of his wife, of suicide. He sees his son as his defense from all this: “the word of God” (pg 5) and a “golden chalice, good to house a god”(pg 75). Ely sees the child as an “angel”(pg 158), recognizing that surviving children are, at the very least, a symbol of hope. In fact, without the golden son to keep him human, perhaps the father, too, would resort to cannibalism. Giving his son godly status is a way to keep his own beast in check, to send the creature with “alabaster bones”(pg 4) back to the recesses of his head. The “fire” the two carry keeps the beast at bay. Perhaps in the hungriest of times the father wonders why he never ate his fellow Man. He looks at his son, too young to defend himself if his father ever decided to to join a blood cult, and realizes that his son’s survival keeps him intact too. (If there isn’t something godly about that revelation, than I don’t know what