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Chapters
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Contents
Chapters
Chapters at a glance
The Road has 20 chapters.
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Chapters20 items
Chapter 1
The novel opens in darkness. A man and his young son are traveling south through a devastated America, pushing a shopping cart of supplies along an ash-covered road.
Chapter 2
The man and boy continue south. The man thinks back on the boy's mother, who chose to kill herself rather than face the world they now live in.
Chapter 3
The man and boy scavenge a house and find a cellar full of people being kept as livestock by a group of cannibals. They escape before being caught, but barely.
Chapter 4
The man and boy find an abandoned house and shelter there for a short time. The man is coughing blood, a sign that he is sick and getting worse.
Chapter 5
The man and boy encounter an old man on the road named Ely. He is nearly blind and claims not to know his own name, or at least refuses to give it.
Chapter 6
The man and boy push deeper into a gray, ash-covered landscape, scavenging for food and staying off the main road when strangers appear.
Chapter 7
The man and boy find an abandoned house and search it for supplies. Inside, they discover a cellar full of captive people being kept as food by a group of marauders.
Chapter 8
Still shaken from the cellar, the man and boy travel in silence. The boy becomes withdrawn and harder to reach.
Chapter 9
The man and boy encounter an old man on the road named Ely, the only named character in the novel. The man is suspicious but the boy insists they share food with him.
Chapter 10
The man and boy reach the coast, which the man has been aiming for throughout the novel. It is not the salvation he may have hoped for.
Chapter 11
The man and boy push deeper into the gray, ruined landscape, scavenging what they can and keeping off the roads when danger feels close.
Chapter 12
The pair find a house and search it carefully before entering. Inside they discover preserved food, a working cistern, and other signs that someone prepared carefully for a long e…
Chapter 13
The road gets harder. The man's cough is more frequent and he is clearly getting sicker, though he hides the worst of it from the boy.
Chapter 14
They reach the coast, which the man has spoken of as a destination and a kind of goal. It is not what either of them hoped.
Chapter 15
After the coast disappoints, the man's health declines sharply. He can no longer pretend he is fine.
Chapter 16
The man and boy push deeper into increasingly hostile territory. Food is nearly gone, and the man's cough worsens.
Chapter 17
The man and boy reach the coast, which the man has described as their destination for the entire journey. The ocean is gray and cold, nothing like the boy imagined.
Chapter 18
The man's condition collapses. He is too sick to travel far and spends much of this section resting on the beach while the boy tends to him.
Chapter 19
The man dies. The boy stays beside his father's body for several days, unable to leave.
Chapter 20
The boy goes with the stranger's family. The novel closes with a brief, separate passage about trout in mountain streams, describing a world that existed before the catastrophe.
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