The saddest part is that the man and his boys believe, must believe, that they are "carrying the fire". That they are the "good guys". Yet under what form can goodness even be manifested in their time, when refusal to steal and cheat and bully will almost certainly result in death? The boy, especially, has no one other than his father to learn the notion of "humanity" from--and it seem that he must have made the choice, early on, to trust in his father's empty promises and bland optimism because that was the only alternative he had to the death, decay, and deranged cannibals he saw all around him. In this context, the rather trite idea of the man and his son--like Noah and Lot before them--being the only remnants of virtue in a world gone evil becomes deeply touching. Because it isn't even really the case that they are two lonely do-gooders surrounded by a horde of bloodthirsty maniacs: it is simply that the world has become purged of any system of value, it is devoid of any structure that can support a framework in which good and bad are opposed. So the man's insistence on having his son believe that there is still that proverbial "fire burning within him" is amazingly beautiful in that it is so futile. Sad, too, at the same time, because at times it become clear that the son is lead to question this: he is always powerfully affected when they come upon other people, and it seems that he is often disappointed in his father, or angry at him, for not being the good person he always insisted on being. For example, he stops talking to his father for a while after they leave the lightning-struck old man in the road, and he cries and begs his father to spare the person who stole their cart. When his father defends his actions and says that it's not as though he killed another man, the son solemnly replies that, by taking his clothes and leaving him utterly stranded, they effectively did kill him. But he has to believe his father's platitudes, for what else would motivate him to keep trekking down this desolate road?

(Also, on the interpretations of "godspoke". Does it mean spoken for by god? Or speaking as though one were god, speaking as the alleged mouthpiece of god? I am taken by both the interpretations presented in class--perhaps this is simply slothful evasion, but I don't seem to be able to, or even want to, come down and pronounce my alliance to one reading or another.)