snakes

Snakes appear only once in the narrative, in a memory the man carries from his childhood. Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men, he watched as they opened up a rocky hillside with pick and mattock, bringing to light a great bolus of serpents, perhaps a hundred in number, collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them began to move sluggishly in the cold hard light, like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly, and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain, and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves, and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk, each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers.

The Memory's Context and Significance

This memory surfaces during the man's final days, when he is feverish and near death, his dreams brightened by the vanished world. The recollection is not a random fragment but a carefully placed meditation on the nature of evil and the human response to it. The men in the memory act not out of malice but out of a profound helplessness: they have no remedy for evil itself, only for its image as they conceive it to be. The snakes, mute and coiled in their communal warmth, are destroyed not because they have done harm but because they represent something the men cannot tolerate. The scene is rendered with clinical precision, the snakes' silent writhing mirrored by the men's own silence as they watch and then disperse, each returning to his ordinary life. The memory carries no judgment, only the weight of an observed truth about how people confront what they cannot understand.

Thematic Resonance with the Present

The memory of the snakes resonates deeply with the world the man and the boy now inhabit. In the post-apocalyptic landscape, the man himself has become a killer, shooting a roadagent who threatened the boy, and he has witnessed the aftermath of cannibalism and the systematic torture of prisoners. The snakes, destroyed for being what they are, prefigure the fate of countless humans in the burned world—the roadagents, the marchers, the prisoners in the cellar—who are killed not for any specific crime but because they are perceived as threats or as embodiments of evil. The memory also echoes the man's own internal struggle: he has no remedy for the evil that surrounds him, only the capacity to meet it with violence when necessary. The snakes' silence, their lack of screams, mirrors the silence of the dead that line the roads, the mute testimony of a world where suffering has become routine.

The Snakes as a Lost World

The snakes belong to a world that no longer exists, a world where such creatures could still be found in the winter hillsides, where men could gather to watch and then go home to their suppers. In the present, the man and the boy encounter no living animals at all—no birds, no fish, no crows, no dogs that survive for more than a day. The snakes, like the brook trout that appear in the novel's final passage, are a memory of a world that was older and more complex than the one that remains. Their destruction, carried out with gasoline and fire, prefigures the larger destruction that has consumed the planet. The memory serves as a quiet elegy for a lost biodiversity, a world where creatures could still gather for warmth and where humans could still afford the luxury of moral certainty.