After the man’s wife decides that survival in this post-apocalyptic world is hopeless, she removes herself from the struggle and uses one of the two bullets they have on herself. Cormac McCarthy has a father and son traveling south in order to improve their chances of survival while dodging cannibals and scrounging for food. Although they are unsure of their destination and of what awaits them further south, on they trod.

Throughout the man’s travels with his son, he sees how men have turned into cannibals, desperate for survival. Cannibals ambush their human prey, and he decides that he would not be able to endure the event of his son being captured and tortured.

The man's response to his struggle with his capacity for self-sacrifice is his decision that if need be, he would have to use the remaining bullet on his son. He would rather endure the pain of sacrificing his son by his own hands rather than have cannibals get him. The Road is a love story between a father and son whose journey represents what life is ultimately all about. We travel on, do our best, love one another. We prepare for potential trouble, never knowing when harm might do us in, but we carry on leading to an unknown destiny, never losing hope.

How is the man struggling internally with sacrificing himself to save his son at the begging of the novel The Road?

When the novel opens, the man and the boy have been traveling together for some time. The reader later learns that the boy’s mother has died, presumably by her own hand. The father and son are co-existing as a unit, the only community that matters to both of them: “each the other’s world entire.”

The man treasures his child, even considering him “the voice of God.” He thinks ahead and plans to the very limited extent that it is possible, such as moving southward when the colder weather sets in, because he knows that they would not survive the winter. The man is also responsible for teaching his son as much as possible about survival and the steps that he should take if his father were to die. Whether or not he wants to think about such a future, the boy has learned that death is inevitable and, in their disintegrated society, that dead bodies may be consumed by cannibals.

The man constantly reinforces the idea that the boy should want to survive if his father perished. In contrast, he tells the boy that he would not carry on alone if the boy died. What would matter to him would be for them to stay together, even after death. The author explains this through their dialogue in a scene where they are drifting off to sleep. First, the boy asks, "What would you do if I died?" The father responds, "If you died I would want to die too." Again, the boy: "So you could be with me?" His father answers, "Yes. So I could be with you."