![]() ![]() There is only the dark present of The Road, but part of that present can still involve memories and dreams of peace and life. This lyrical final scene, then, shows that the remembering of the past has become a separate entity in itself. Sleep is when memories and brain connections are made and dreaming occurs because the brain tries to make connections between various thoughts. ![]() The book ends with a beautiful memory of brook trout, but the man, the only protagonist who could remember such things, is dead by then. Debate continues among sleep experts about why we dream. This theory asserts that dreams are a key part of the nervous system process that converts short-term memories formed during the day into long-term memories. True names, like birds, and plants, exist only in the past and in dreams. Their anonymity makes the boy and man seem more archetypal, but it also offers another glimpse of how the present world has robbed people of their basic humanity and histories. Part of memory in the novel also involves names, as the characters are conspicuously unnamed. For him, part of “carrying the fire” means carrying the memory of a better world. ![]() The man’s dream-memories offer him a kind of escapism that he often avoids, as they seem like a temptation to “give up” or die, but at the same time these memories are one of the reasons the man keeps persevering. The boy never experienced the pre-apocalyptic world, so he has no such memories. When he or the boy have nightmares they are just an extension of the present, where the worst has already happened, but in his good dreams the man returns to his happy memories of the past, and the world of nature and his wife. The present world of The Road is dark and full of death, and the only real color appears in the man’s dreams and memories. ![]()
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