The Man's Memories

The man’s past is something the book briefly touches on compared to some of the other themes but It is just as important. We never get a full summary of his life before but instead, we get moments and glimpses into his life that help us understand his actions in the book, and what he is teaching the boy. In my map, I split his memories into ones about childhood, love, letting go, and the world. The gray bubbles are the man’s thoughts on memory, the quote “Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget” tells us how to interpret the things that he recalls, that these are not things he wants to remember”(12).

He avoids remembering his past so much there was even a movement where he takes out his wallet and left his every possession from the time before, even a picture of his wife. This is then immediately followed by his and his wife’s last interaction, a painful and sorrowful memory of her leaving him and the boy. In the book, this is the largest piece of his past we get and this is probably an event that plagues the man every night, he wonders why he is even still going and maybe agrees with the wife’s point that “The one thing I can tell you is that you won‘t survive for yourself“(57). Her words cut him deep like a blade.

Cormac McCarthy has used memory in this book to show how the man is struggling to understand this seemingly new world he is in, except this is not a new world at all. He does not just get to forget even though he left his stuff behind, instead his memories become his penance and it somehow becomes easier to live in this bleak, colorless reality. It is unclear whether the last passage is the man’s memory but it tells us that destruction is the pattern that leads to life, and this is a cycle that no one can escape.