Conflict with thief

The conflict with the thief erupts late in the journey, when the man and the boy return to their beach camp to find it ransacked. The tarp, blankets, water bottle, food stores, and even their shoes are gone; the sailcloth leanto has blown into the dunes, and the cart itself has vanished. The man curses himself as a "stupid ass" and, with the boy crying beside him, sets off in pursuit. They track the thief by a half-teaspoon of beach sand that has spilled from the cart's understructure onto the blacktop—a clue the boy spots. The man jogs at first but is soon forced to walk, coughing and wheezing, as the dusk deepens.

The Confrontation

They overtake the thief an hour later, bent over the loaded cart and trundling down the road. When he sees them, he tries to run but cannot, and finally stops, standing behind the cart with a butcher knife. The man levels the pistol and cocks it—two loud clicks in the silence of the salt moorland. The thief is an outcast from one of the communes, his right hand mutilated: the fingers have been cut away, leaving only a "fleshy spatula" that he tries to hide behind his back. He is scrawny, sullen, bearded, filthy, his plastic coat held together with tape. The man orders him away from the cart and tells him to drop the knife. The thief looks around as if for help, then lays the knife on the blankets and backs away. The boy, sobbing, begs his father not to kill the man. The man ignores him and commands the thief to strip naked. The thief pleads, but the man is implacable: "I'll kill you where you stand." Slowly, the thief removes his vile rags and shoes, piling them in the cart as ordered, and stands naked in the road, shivering, covering himself with his hand. The man swings the cart around and sets off south, leaving the thief behind. The boy cries and looks back; the man tells him to stop, but the boy cannot. When they reach a curve in the road and the thief is no longer visible, the boy sits down in the road, sobbing. The man digs out their shoes and puts them on the boy, then walks back up the road but cannot see the thief. The boy insists they must help him: "He's going to die." The man squats and looks at him: "I'm scared," he says. "Do you understand? I'm scared." The boy looks up, his face streaked with soot, and says, "Yes I am. I am the one."

The Aftermath

They wheel the cart back up the road and call out into the empty dusk, but no one answers. The man piles the thief's shoes and clothes in the road, puts a rock on top, and they go on. That night, making a dry camp with no fire, the boy says nothing. The man tries to see his face in the blue light of the gas burner: "I wasnt going to kill him," he says. The boy does not answer. Later, lying in the dark, the boy says, "But we did kill him." The next morning they eat and set out, the cart so loaded that one wheel is giving out. The road bends along the coast, dead sheaves of saltgrass overhanging the pavement, the lead-colored sea shifting in the distance. The silence is profound. That night the man wakes coughing; the boy is awake. The man says, "You have to talk to me." The boy says he is trying. The man apologizes for waking him. The boy says it is okay. The man gets up and walks out to the road, where the black shape of it runs from dark to dark. A distant low rumble—not thunder—passes under his feet, something imponderable shifting in the dark, the earth itself contracting with the cold. It does not come again.

Thematic Significance

The conflict with the thief crystallizes the novel's central ethical dilemma: the man's survival-driven ruthlessness versus the boy's unwavering compassion. The man's actions—stripping a starving man naked and leaving him to die—are a brutal assertion of the law of self-preservation that has governed their journey. Yet the boy's response reveals that this law is not absolute. His anguish, his insistence that they help the thief, and his final, devastating statement—"But we did kill him"—mark a moral awakening that the man cannot fully share. The thief, like the lightning-struck man and the basement prisoners, is a face of the other that the boy cannot turn away from. The man's attempt to justify himself—"I wasnt going to kill him"—rings hollow against the boy's simple truth. In this conflict, the boy becomes the carrier of the fire, the one who insists on a humanity that transcends mere survival. The man, for all his love and protection, is left to confront the limits of his own moral world, a world that the boy is already beginning to outgrow.