Trust is the most important factor in the building of relationships with anyone in the world. Depending on the trust there is with that person that bond between those two people can be taken more seriously. If a person is one that you can't trust a lot then you have to be able to determine how long the bond will be with that person and how deep the level of trust will be with that person. I like to think that trust is also a reversibility factor in the relations with other people. If someone is not trusted very much then you wouldn't trust with them some of your most important secrets and neither will they trust you with their secrets. I like to see it as if one person trusts a lot of things in you then you would most probably trust them the same back. In the case of The Road there is a very special relationship of trust built between the father and the boy because they are the only two persons they can trust. There is also the fact that they are not around many people they want to trust but there is a relationship not only of trust with each other, but also dependency. They trust their life in the others hand therefore they become dependent in the other person. If something happens to the father then the kid wouldn't be able to survive and the same thing happens vice versa, making them care for the others' life as much as their own. The degree of trust can be seen when the narrator says: "He wiped the boy's mouth with his hand. I'm sorry, the boy said. Shh. You didn't do anything wrong" (pg.247). When the boy is very sick his life basically depends on his father's ability to take care of him while surviving. McCarthy said the part where the boy felt sorry to show the reader that he fears for his life but more for his father's life because he will be more troubled and maybe because of his fault the bad guys could capture them. He is also apologizing to his father for the inconvenience produced and the possibility that they will run out of food while he is recovering.
The other kind of trust produced in this book is the exact opposite. The fear of trusting any other person in the road is clear because they are not able to know whether a person is bad or good. One clear example of the distrust environment with other people is when they meet the old man and he says: "I couldn't trust you with it. To do something with it. […] I think in times like these the less said the better" (pg.171). The level of distrust this old man has is very high because he avoids talking to them for the fear they are the bad guys and would do something to him. I don't blame him because in the position he is at I would probably do the same. Therefore since there wasn't any trust between these two parties there wasn't any bond made and only a sharing of food happened.
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