The Road: Part 2

"No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. There is no later. This is later."

This quote explains how the Man and Boy's lives work: from day to day. When the fallout happened, you can say that time gradually ceased to matter; of course time still exists, but there is no reason for it besides the telling of night and day, but you don't really need time for that either, do you? The Man and the Boy have nothing planned, except for their destination, South. Each day brings something new: warmth, shelter, food, etc. They live in the moment, and this is all for their survival.

"You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said."
"Yes. We're still the good guys. And we always will be."

The background for this quote is the conversation the Man and the Boy have after the Man saves the Boy from the cannibal by shooting him in the head when he holds the Boy hostage with a knife. This quote shows that the Boy is the only reason the Man lives, to protect him, and also poses the question of what it means to be a "good guy". Obviously, the Boy thought that being a "good guy" not only meant restraining yourself from committing cannibalism but being non-violent. This scene was probably the first time the Boy saw the Man do anything violent and it frightened him and switched around his understanding of "good guys".

And to answer the question of Yeat's and Eliot's vision of the end of the world compared to McCarthy's novel The Road, well, Yeat's most likely believed that humans are innately evil while Eliot believed that indecision between righteousness and sin was harsh and more evil than either of the two. But McCarthy's vision, I think, is in between Yeat's and Eliot's. In McCarthy's novel, the good are not completely good (for instance, when the Man shot the cannibal, even though he had good intentions) and the bad are not completely bad (think of the cannibals' will to survive).