The Man (The Road)

"I try to look like any common traveling killer, but my heart is hammering. When it comes to the boy I have only one question: Can you do it? When the time comes?"

- The Man

"I'm not going to let anything happen to you...I'm going to take care of you...I'm always going to try and be here for you...and I'm going to kill anyone who touches you."

- The Man, to the Boy.

The Man is the main character of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road. A survivor of a post-apocalyptic world that was struck by an unknown apocalyptic event, the Man is attempting to take care of and protect his son, referred to in the story as the Boy. His wife, distraught wife with the state of the world and the hopelessness of the situation, killed herself sometime after the Boy was born. The duo of father and son finds themselves aimlessly wandering around the wasteland that is the world as they try to find a way of staying safe for short periods of time from bands of roaming cannibals, bandits, and various other threats. When all else fails, the Man keeps a revolver with only two rounds in it, for the purpose of killing himself and the Boy to prevent their suffering should they be captured by one of many roving gangs of cannibals.

At some point in their travels, the man and the Boy stumble upon a mansion being used as a home by cannibals. The cannibals return unexpectedly, and the Man, having already used one round of the gun on a bandit, plans to kill the Boy in order to save him from whatever the cannibals have in store. However, the Cannibals are distracted by some of their captives, and the two manage to escape.

After run-ins with various individuals like a blind man and a thief that the Man leaves for dead, the Man is attacked by a mysterious archer, who shoots him in the knee before the Man kills him with a flare gun he scavenged from a boat he found on the coastline. Badly injured, the Man teaches the boy to do whatever it takes to survive, and dies. Distraught, the Bou considers committing suicide with the revolvers only round, only for a family that had been secretly following the Man and the Boy out of concern for the Boy to appear and offer the boy the chance to join their family, assuring him that they're the good guys, which references the Boy's conversation with the Man early in the story where he asks if they were "The good guys."