Lit Log

My project focuses on many of the people that the man and boy have encountered on the road. There are many occurrences of the man and boy throughout the drawing. The man is visualized in a purple shirt, used to represent his personal battle between good (blue) and evil (purple), and the boy is wearing yellow as he is hopeful and optimistic, therefore being one of the shining lights left in a dark world. There are four obstacles on this map, in chronological order. The first one classified as “the rat”, is on page 61, where a man kidnaps the boy and the man threatens to shoot him. The rat “dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up holding him against his chest with the knife at his throat. The man […] fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.” The picture shows the man firing at the rat while the rat has a knife in his hands and is in hot pursuit of the boy. The next thing on the timeline is multiple people in “the bunker” that the man and the boy end up stumbling upon on pg. 103, where they find “naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. Jesus, he whispered. Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. ‘Help us, they whispered. Please help us.’” The picture shows the despair on the face of the people in the bunker, while the man and boy are expressionless in shock. The second to last occurrence is “the thief”, who ends up stealing the man and boy’s cart, and the boy breaks the news to the man on pg. 250, where they follow the tracks of the cart and chase the thief. After they find him, the man tells the thief to “Get away from the cart. He looked at them. He looked at the boy. He was an outcast from one of the communes and the fingers of his right hand had been cut away. He tried to hide it behind him. A sort of fleshy spatula. The cart was piled high. He’d taken everything.” The man holds out his gun and threatens the guy, telling him to give everything to them, even the thief’s own clothes. And then the last one is where the boy encounters his new family after the man dies. “Someone was coming. He started to turn and go back into the woods but he didn’t. He just stood in the road and waited, the pistol in his hand. He’d piled all the blankets on his father and he was cold and he was hungry. The man that hove into view and stood there looking at him was dressed in a gray and yellow ski parka. He carried a shotgun upside down over his shoulder on a braided leather lanyard and he wore a nylon bandolier filled with shells for the gun”