Ely

On pg. 161, the boy embraces a stranger “distant on the road,” “a traveler not one for looking back.” By the time this old man sets out on his own again, the boy is similarly described as not “looking back at all.” This parallel detail bookends Ely’s time with the The Road duo and (excluding the boy’s father who we know will not survive by the end of The Road) suggests a likeness between the two characters. Reading “The Black Hole of Trauma” provided a vocabulary with which to name the adaptive behaviors of the old man, the man and the boy. In the impromptu decision to take in Ely, the following “Black Hole” summarizing sentence plays out: “When people come to concentrate selectively on reminders of their past, life tends to become colorless and contemporary experience ceases to be a teacher.”

The boy was born shortly after The Great Unknown Disaster. Living in its aftermath, forward is his primary direction. A survivor on the road where there are few, a part of a missing generation in the novel, a witness to the Disaster, a spiritual soundboard for the man and (to bring in a recent class discussion) a man with a name, Ely is a relic. However, he would be the last man to use the term. In response to being asked when he ate last, his first piece of dialogue is “I dont know.” “Black Hole” says that “PTSD victims remain embedded in the trauma as a contemporary experience, instead of being able to accept it as something belonging to the past.” Anti-PTSD and extreme in his commitment to divorcing the past from the present, Ely says “I ate just now,” to clarify when he ate last. In a study of WWII veterans mentioned in “Black Hole,” those without PTSD 45 years later “had considerably altered their original accounts; the most intense horror of the events had been diluted.” Ely’s distortion of reality has resulted in a complete washing out. Anonymous and practically non-existent because of his insistence on keeping a false name, evasion of questions and limited disclosure, Ely does not keep track of time, or, to be specific, does not keep track of past time.

The man displays the clearest signs of PTSD. By the time of Ely’s appearance, we know that the man “tends to experience sleep problems because [he] is unable to quiet [himself] in order to avoid having traumatic nightmares” and that, in a state of post-apocalyptic fear, “the world becomes an unsafe place.” Threat is generalized. There is a “continuing threat of annihilation.” An injured old man is characterized as a minor threat – the boy treats him like a stray puppy – and the man overracts, calls the old man a possible “decoy,” expects an ambush. Reminiscent of the boy’s repeated question, “Are we going to die?” (asked when neither living nor dying sounds appealing), the man expresses the paradox, “Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.” I’m most interested in the interaction between the man and the old man. For a brief time, the man becomes the boy. What’s to be gained from this role reversal? Is Ely’s dismissal of the past ideal?