The woman

The woman is the man's wife and the boy's mother, a figure who exists in the novel almost entirely through memory, dream, and the man's retrospective grief. She makes one extended appearance in a flashback argument before her suicide, and her absence shapes the entire journey south. Her decision to leave and die by her own hand, using obsidian the man had taught her to sharpen, constitutes the story's most explicit confrontation with the question of whether survival is worth the cost.

Identity and Background

The woman is never named. She is defined by her relationships: wife to the man, mother to the boy. She gave birth to the boy in their bed by the light of a dry-cell lamp, wearing dishwashing gloves, while the man cut the cord with kitchen shears and wrapped the newborn in a towel. The birth occurred a few nights after she and the man had sat at a window eating a midnight supper by candlelight, watching distant cities burn. Before the catastrophe, she appears in the man's memories as a figure of elegance and sensuality: he remembers her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts, and he recalls sitting beside her in a theatre, feeling the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. In his dreams she comes to him out of a green and leafy canopy, wearing a dress of gauze, her dark hair carried up in combs of ivory and shell, her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. But the man mistrusts these dreams; he says the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril, and all else was the call of languor and of death.

The Argument and Her Departure

The woman's only sustained scene in the present tense is a bitter argument by lamplight. She tells the man they are not survivors but "the walking dead in a horror film." She predicts that sooner or later they will be caught, raped, killed, and eaten, and she accuses him of refusing to face it. She says she should have done it a long time ago, when there were three bullets in the gun instead of two. She tells him she has taken a new lover — death — and that he can give her what the man cannot. She says her heart was ripped out of her the night the boy was born, and that her only hope is for eternal nothingness. She refuses to say goodbye to the boy. The man begs her to wait until morning, but she will not. She leaves in the dark, and the man knows she will do it with a flake of obsidian — he had taught her himself, sharper than steel, the edge an atom thick. In the morning the boy says nothing, but when they are packed and ready to set out he turns and looks back at their campsite and says, "She's gone isn't she?" And the man says, "Yes, she is."

The Man's Memory and Grief

The woman haunts the man's thoughts throughout the journey. He carries a photograph of her in his billfold until the billfold wears a corner-shaped hole in his trousers; then one day he sits by the roadside, spreads everything out on the blacktop, pitches the sweat-blackened leather into the woods, and lays the photograph down in the road as well. He thinks about the picture afterward and thinks he should have tried to keep her in their lives in some way, but he does not know how. He wakes coughing and walks out so as not to wake the child, following a stone wall in the dark, kneeling in the ashes like a penitent, and says her name aloud. He remembers her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown. He remembers her seated in a theatre beside him, leaning forward listening to the music, holding his hand in her lap. He can remember everything of her save her scent. In his dreams she is sick and he cares for her, but the dream bears the look of sacrifice and he thinks differently: he did not take care of her and she died alone somewhere in the dark, and there is no other dream nor other waking world and no other tale to tell.

The Boy's Memory

The boy's memory of his mother is filtered through dreams and the man's stories. He has a dream about a wind-up penguin that waddles and flaps its flippers, set in the house they used to live in, where the penguin comes around a corner without having been wound up — the winder was not turning. The boy wakes whimpering and tells the man the dream. Later, after the man has coughed blood and walked out into the dark, the boy says, "I wish I was with my mom." The man understands this to mean the boy wishes he were dead, and tells him he must not say that. The boy says he cannot help it. The man asks how he is supposed to do it, and the boy says he does not know. The woman's absence is a wound the boy carries, but he does not speak of her again directly after that night.

Thematic Significance

The woman represents the argument against survival — the position that endurance without hope, without a future, is not courage but a prolongation of horror. She refuses to be conscripted into the man's project of carrying the fire. Her suicide is the novel's most radical challenge to the man's faith that the boy is his warrant, that the child is the word of God. She tells the man he will not survive for himself, and that a person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. She is right about the logic of the world they inhabit, and the man knows there is no argument against her. Her coldness is her final gift. The novel does not condemn her; it lets her reasoning stand unanswered, and the man carries her absence as a permanent doubt beneath his devotion.