the woman

The woman is a powerful and ambiguous symbolic function in the novel. She represents both the giving of life and the temptation of death.

‘He was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds’ suggests that she is beautiful and death which is an ironic reflection on the beauty within death, as it promises an escape from the nightmare in which they live. The reference to a ‘siren’ encourages the idea of luring men to their death through their beauty which in turn will destroy the man. The man also makes a statement to reassure the boy when he has a terrible dream; if he stops having nightmares then they are living in one. The man however has dreams about the woman which almost succeed in luring him to sleep forever as he has to force himself awake showing that he has, subconsciously, already given up.

For the man, the woman’s absence is a constant reminder of the alternative to struggling to survive.

The woman killed herself as she knew what the future held for herself and her family. She represents how easy it is to escape the world of terror surrounding the man and boy; this only makes it harder for the man to face the aspect of death as it undermines everything that he and the boy have been struggling for. This shows that she is bold enough to leave her family behind to suffer, partly because she could not kill her own son and didn’t believe the man could either; who when the time comes can’t bring himself to do it ‘I can’t’. As the novel progresses the woman’s image becomes darker and tainted as she becomes all but skin and bones in a dress with the man’s final image of her it shows that she, to him, is the very symbol of death.

The vulnerability of the boy would seem far less evident if his mother was there as well.

The boy throughout the novel is presented as a weak and vulnerable character because he has nobody to care for his emotional needs along with protection from the threats that cause his emotional distress. A mother is far more attentive to a child’s emotional turmoil than a father and would go out of their way to ensure that they were feeling okay. Opposed to the general ‘Okay. Okay’ from the man, which does little to calm and reassure the boy when a situation gets out of hand.  The mother would spend a lot of time attending to the boys needs while the father protects them (in an ideal perspective) it would also appear as a much more stable relationship if three parties were involved as the level of protection would be higher making the boy seem less vulnerable to attack.