A foil is a character that highlights and shows qualities that another character (usually the protagonist) does not have. The foil character is meant to more clearly show what the other character is by showing what he is not. The boy in The Road is a decent foil character. The father is an extremely cautious and wary character. He knows of a world before the apocalypse, so he knows how bad things have gotten. He has seen people turn into animals and lose all sense of humanity. The boy cannot grasp this change in humanity. All that the boy knows is this dismal world. Consequently, the boy is not quite as cautious as his father is about other people. Additionally, the father is sometimes prone to dark thoughts and bouts of self-pity, and it is always the boy that pulls his father out of these instances. Interestingly, it is the boy that most often is the focused character, and he is often the one reminding his father to stay present in the moment and concentrate on the present reality.
It is interesting how McCarthy plays with the foil dynamic to highlight character traits. Normally, the father is the cautious character about going into a house, and the boy is more naturally curious. However, that is not the case when they come across the man's boyhood home. The man has a strong desire to go into the house, and the boy feels extremely wary about it. The boy's opposite reaction still highlights his father's reaction, but it is flipped. In this case, the boy's reaction is highlighting the man's normal character traits in reverse. The boy is emulating what his father normally models. The boy is not doing this to be spiteful or willful. He is doing this because this is what he has been taught, and he is scared by his father's departure from the norm. This further highlights what the dad is normally like in contrast to what the son is normally like.
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