He cocked the gun and aimed it out over the bay and pulled the trigger. The flare arced up into the murk with a long whoosh and broke somewhere out over the
water in a clouded light and hung there. The hot tendril of magnesium drifted slowly down the dark and the pale foreshore tide started in the glare and slowly
faded. He looked down at the boy’s upturned face 262-263. On another occasion, the father can kill his attacker by using his pistol. It happens
when he and his son are passing some buildings on the main road. They are attacked with a darted arrow. The father hears the dull twang of the bowstring and feels sharp pain in his
leg. He looks up the building near him and sees his attacker is stepping back into the frame of the second story window to draw the bow again. Before everything goes worst, the
father quickly shoots the attacker and strikes him He clawed the blankets to one side and lunged and grabbed the flaregun and raised
up and cocked it and rested his arm on the side of the cart. The boy was clinging to him. When the man stepped back into the frame of the window to draw the bow
again he fired. The flare went rocketing up toward the window in a long white arc and then they could hear the man screaming 281-282.
Based on direct comment and mannerism, the father can be considered skilled. He is good at machinery and gun. He can repair broken tools and shoot well.
3. Educated
In the story, the father’s profession is not told but from his past the readers may conclude that he is literate and educated. Once, he decides to visit his family house. He
tells to his son that when he was a kid, the house is a place where he and his family spend their time together doing many activities including doing homework with his sisters.
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This is where we used to have Christmas when I was a boy. He turned and looked out at the waste of the yard. A tangle of dead lilac. The shape of a hedge. On cold
winter nights when electricity was out in a storm we would sit here, me and my sisters, doing our homework 26.
Besides, there are also some clues from the direct comment of the author and the character’s conversation with others that show the father is literate. From the story it is told
that the father brings storybooks for his son. He often reads the stories to his son and teaches him to be able to read. He also reads newspapers when he has time to do it.
He sat by a gray window in the gray light in abandoned house in the late afternoon and read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint
concerns. At eight the primrose closes. He watched the boy sleeping. Can you do it? When the time comes? 28.
He banked the fire against the seam of rock where he’d built it and he strung the tarp behind them to reflect the heat and they sat warm in their refuge while he told
the boy stories. Old stories of courage and justice as he remembered them until the boy was asleep in his blanket… 42.
The father also shows that he is educated when confronting and threatening a cannibal to release his son, he is able to list several obscure portions of the brain, at which the cannibal
asks him if he is a doctor. Because the bullet travels faster than sound. It will be in your brain before you can
hear it. To hear it you will need a frontal lobe and things with names like colliculus and temporal gyrus and you wont have them any more. They’ll just be soup.
Are you a doctor? I’m not anything 67.
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Further, the father concerns about his son’s health. He always worries that his son needs Vitamin D so that he will not get rickets. He also knows that dark volcanic rock
called obsidian that is usually used to make glass can kill people quickly because it is very sharp. When his wife decides to commit suicide because she has lost all hope for the
cannibals’ meager existence, he tells her to do it with a flake of obsidian. He says that the flake is sharper than steel 60. It possibly means that she slits her wrists with sharp flints
her husband has taught her how to use for that purpose. In addition, during his conversation with his son, he reveals some knowledge he
has. Through what he says, the father wants to tell his son what he knows so that his son can learn something useful for his life. He explains many things such as the function of a
dam, a kind of mushroom named morel is consumable, and a bird cannot fly to the out space because of the coldness.
What is that, Papa? It’s a dam
What’s it for? It made the lake. Before they built the dam that was just a river down there. The
dam used the water that ran through it to turn big fans called turbines that would generate electricity.
To make lights. Yes to make lights 19.
Based on past life, direct comment, speech, and thought, it is obvious that the father is educated. He is literate and is able to explain some knowledge related to human body,
health, plant and the rest is common knowledge taught in school.
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4. Sick
