The Road, Reading Blog #8 - Illegal Aliens

 Foreign relations. What does that phrase bring to mind? Immigration policy is important to any country, and often hotly contested. Wars are often fought over borders with other countries, or simply ideals. Much of human conflict, in fact, is based on seemingly fundamental differences between those involved. The idea of people, of cultures, being alien is a very simple one, and very easy to believe in. Certainly, as someone who's lived in a few different continents, I personally am familiar with the feeling of being an alien, or interacting with them.
But in The Road, characters never encounter people from other countries -- on the contrary, it is the father who feels like an alien with his own son, "a being from a planet that no longer existed." (153) This seems to be a frightening thought, especially to someone who awakes because he's "been visited in a dream by creatures of a kind he'd never seen before" and remembers the feeling of this long after the dream itself is forgotten. His fear of the unknown is not unreasonable, and it is a very straightforward fear, one he can live with. The true fear he finds in his dream is his inability to comfort his son, to give him happiness and raise him the way he was raised. He ruminates that the tales of his life are suspect, and decides that he "could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well" (154) and as such, he should not even try. To add insult to injury, he thinks that "perhaps the child had known this better than he", known that "he could not enkindle
in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own" (154). Some part of him is ashes, in dead and desecrated, burned up with this realization. "Some part of him always wished it to be over." (154) For some part of him, it is over.
His only use for his past is to tell his son about it, and he cannot. His only use for stories is to share them, and he cannot. With this realization, his stories are ashes. If he cannot tell his stories, he may as well be an alien, who for all intents and purposes cannot relate to those he encounters. It is more than a mere language barrier, or a separate past -- it is a separate present, as the present is colored by the past. And since he cannot relate his stories to his son, he cannot share his present. Their foreign relations are nonexistent, doomed from the outset.