Joey

Joey is Ish’s youngest son, a quick-minded and inquisitive boy whose appetite for books and abstract ideas makes him the focus of his father’s hope for civilization’s future. Ish sees in him not just a beloved child but a possible bearer of the intelligence through which humanity might rise again; Joey’s death during the epidemic forces Ish to confront how much that hope had become bound to one person.

Identity and Early Curiosity

Joey’s intellectual interests develop rapidly. When Ish finally takes him to the University Library, he recognizes that he should have brought him there sooner. Joey runs ahead eagerly, then wanders through the reading room and stacks, silently taking in the book titles as he passes. In the lobby, he asks whether these are all the books in the world and whether he may read them. Ish tells him he may choose any of them, provided he returns each book to its place so it will not be lost or scattered. The exchange makes the library more than a storehouse of remnants: for Joey, it is an invitation to enter a world of knowledge that survived the disaster.

His curiosity takes a mathematical form as well. Ish tries to use wood-carving to kindle intellectual interests in the children, but Walt excels at carving while Joey does not. What catches Joey’s attention instead is the enduring language of line and angle. Ish finds him cutting triangles of different shapes from paper, trimming their ends, and fitting the pieces together to make a straight line. The episode distinguishes Joey’s intelligence from a general precocity: he is drawn to patterns and principles that Ish regards as among the truths preserved even after the Great Disaster.

Striving, Difference, and Mana

Joey’s intellectual promise does not make his childhood effortless. Ish observes that Joey is caught between groups: he tries to keep up physically with boys two years older, who are naturally stronger, while having little in common with younger children. Ish also thinks Joey neglects his twin, Josey, partly because he is at an age when boys have little interest in girls and partly because he considers her less bright. These are Ish’s interpretations of the strain surrounding his son, not proof that Joey is indifferent to those around him. They show, however, that Ish sees Joey’s exceptional qualities alongside limitations, social difficulty, and less admirable traits.

One incident intensifies that sense of difference. The other children are afraid to pick up Ish’s hammer, but they accept Joey doing what they themselves will not. Ish recalls this as evidence that the children imagine some power resides in Joey, and wonders whether they—or Joey himself—believe he possesses mana, the special force attributed to certain people in accounts of tribal belief. He does not present that power as a fact. Instead, he connects the children’s response to a question that troubles him: why do some people become leaders when others seem better qualified? Joey’s intelligence and the aura surrounding him become intertwined in Ish’s hopes, even as the source of his influence remains uncertain.

A Father’s Hope for the Future

Ish repeatedly places Joey at the center of his thoughts, despite recognizing his weaknesses. He believes that intelligence made civilization possible and that only its continued exercise can make civilization rise again. Because Joey possesses that intelligence, Ish treats him as a living possibility for the future, not merely as a child to be taught. The University Library and the paper triangles belong to the same pattern: Ish wants Joey to inherit knowledge, but also to discover the structures that knowledge depends on.

When seeds return from the expedition eastward, Joey is watching Ish from across the room. Ish calls him over and explains that the community had waited so long to grow corn that Ish had eventually found no living seed. Now another chance has arrived. The small red and black kernels are unlike the large, flat corn Ish expected, but their unfamiliarity does not diminish their importance. He takes Joey into the kitchen, where they light the gasoline stove and parch two dozen kernels in a frying pan. Ish knows that using seed this way is a waste, yet feels too moved to resist showing Joey what the corn means: a renewed possibility of life and a future. The moment joins their intimacy to the hope Ish invests in both learning and survival.

That hope is sharpened by a brief journey with his father. After Ish gets the jeep running again, Joey rides beside him as they set out with the others and their wagons. The vehicle has moved only a few feet in its first test, but it has started and stopped; for Ish, that small success opens onto the larger question of what a whole community might accomplish. Joey’s place beside him makes him a companion in that glimpse of collective possibility, as well as the child in whom Ish most strongly locates the promise of what may come next.

Death and the Limits of Hope

During the epidemic, Ish learns that Joey is dead. When he asks whether the children include his own, Em answers that theirs died five days earlier. Before she says Joey’s name, Ish sees her lips begin to form it and knows what he is about to hear. His mind turns at once to the meaning he had assigned his son: the chosen bearer of light, the child through whom the future might be carried. He cannot continue the conversation. The loss is not only personal; it collapses the particular hope that Joey would be able to carry forward what Ish believes civilization needs.

Afterward, Ish sometimes refuses to admit that Joey is gone. He catches himself making plans as if the boy were still there and recognizes that he is escaping into fantasy because reality seems too bleak. The habit resembles a way he had previously survived loneliness, but now it protects him from grief rather than helping him adjust. At Joey’s funeral, Ezra speaks about the children through small, pleasing memories of their play. When he reaches Joey, he does not recount a remarkable achievement or mention that a year had been named for him; he offers an ordinary incident, like those shared for the other children. The children glance toward Ish, aware of the bond between father and son, as if wondering whether Ish will try to deny the death or call Joey back. Ish knows he can work no miracle.

Grief, Recognition, and Legacy

Ish’s first movement beyond undiluted sorrow comes at the Library. Sitting on its overgrown, partly ruined granite steps, he pounds at the stone with his hammer until a flake breaks away. For the first time, he remembers Joey without simply dissolving into grief. He asks himself whether Joey could really have changed anything: he was a bright little boy, not someone able to stand against the whole current of the altered world. Ish imagines that Joey would have struggled without succeeding and would have been unhappy. The thought does not cancel his loss; it alters the form of his remembrance, allowing him to see the child apart from the enormous future he had made him represent.

That recognition becomes more intimate when Ish understands Joey as resembling himself. He thinks of them both as people who struggle and cannot simply be happy. The insight brings affection and sorrow together: Joey’s difficulty is no longer only a mark of the promise Ish lost, but a likeness that connects father and son. Ish continues to preserve an illusion of books and the future, just as others continue their characteristic work, but he no longer treats that future as something Joey alone could secure.

Much later, as the last of the city burns around a younger generation living among the rocks, Ish thinks again of Joey. He wonders whether things might have been different if Joey had lived, or if there had been others like him, but he cannot settle whether that alternate future would have been better. The question leaves Joey’s legacy deliberately unresolved. He remains the child in whom Ish concentrated the hope of intellectual renewal, but the novel does not show that intelligence alone could have overcome the pressures of the post-disaster world. Joey’s death exposes both the emotional force and the fragility of Ish’s belief that one exceptional person can carry civilization’s future.