9/13 Taison Chen Period 8

Taison Chen

Period 8

Modern Mythology Blog 2020

9/13/19

• Aim: How does The Road ask its readers to explore the extremes of violence and compassion?
• In class, we discussed how when people had the choice of saving one of two people, some people were able to easily choose, while others had trouble choosing. When I had the choice between my mom and my sister, I made the choice of saving my sister since she would still have a lot more to experience in life, while my mom already had gone through a lot and experienced a lot of what life had to offer.

•  Do Now: Write down the names of the two most important people in your life
• My mom and my sister

• How do you rationalize?

• You are in a circumstance where you can only save one of the two people you wrote down.
  They are both begging for their lives; sacrificing yourself so they both can live is not an option,

                    neither is sacrificing both.

• I would choose to save my sister since she has a lot more of life to experience while my mom had
  already experienced a lot.

• Exploring The Boy’s Compassion
• We are encountered with several circumstances where the boy shows unyielding compassion:
  the man struck by lightning, the dog, the other boy.
• What are we supposed to understand about the boy’s compassion?
• The author wants us to understand that compassion is something that can be lost,
  where the father has long lost this compassion, while the boy still has it, urging the father

                              to want to protect it from the outside world. This is important because it shows                                      how the difference in the environment a person was born in can show the                                              difference in how a person views the world. The boy was born into an apocalyptic                                world, while the father was born into the pre-apocalyptic world, so the father                                        knows how bad the world has gotten, and what he needs to do to survive, while                                    the boy does not understand this.

• Violence… it gets pretty ugly out there
• “Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that
  the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary

consort of catamites ill-clothed against the cold and fitted in dog collars and yoked each to

each” (92)

• A view of an apocalyptic future, but how is it compared to now?
• The thought of an apocalyptic future sounds very bad, yet unlikely. The apocalyptic world sounds
  like the complete opposite of the world today, making us think there is a small chance of that happening.

• We had a class discussion talking about how whether helping a person who made a bad decision
  makes you a good or bad person. Ms. Fusaro gave the example of her running a red light and crashing

into another person who was drunk driving. Using this example, she asked the students whether they

would choose to save her or the drunk driver if they could only choose one person. Some students choose

to save her, but others choose to save the drunk driver. This brought the discussion of whether the person

made a bad choice deliberately or without realization. The students said that they would save the person

who made the choice without realization because if the person made the choice deliberately, he or she

would make the same one again.