The Road Two

"Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he."

129-130

This passage more explicitly describes the power of storytelling to create realities. The father tells his son "tales" about life before the catastrophe which has rendered the earth a wasteland to its survivors. However, to the son, these tales are hard to believe because they are so unlike the current reality. The father, having experienced the pre-apocalyptic world, is thus alien to the son, who knows only life after the disaster. The earth enjoyed by the man during his own childhood is a "planet that no longer existed" to the boy. When the man considers attempting to make this old world real to his son by telling stories about what used to be, he realizes that the story is too difficult and sad to tell; the whole story is a story that ends in loss. His son, perhaps, knows that the story of the old world ends with the present world, that his father's nostalgia cannot reproduce that older world unless the story leads them right back to where they are.