Death

Death pervades over everything in the book. The characters expect to die at any moment, and the father often checks if his son is still breathing. Right from the beginning, the father has a bad cough, and as the weather gets worse, the coughing fits become more frequent, and the father begins to cough up blood. He tries to hide the coughing fits from his son, but at the end, the boy admits that no matter how far away the father went to cough, he always heard him. No doubt, this prompts the boy's constant questioning of whether they are going to die.

It seems strange the father thinks he can keep his son in the dark about dying. Already the son knows his mother shot herself, and the father has even trained his son to do the same in order to prevent a slow, painful death if...