The two central characters in The Road most definitely show signs of post traumatic stress disorder, though not necesessarily as defined by the Black Hole of Trauma essay. Struggling to find any direct connection between the essay and the novel, i went online to look for symptoms of PTSD, and found many that correspond to the novel. One of the major symptoms listed is trouble sleeping. Throughout the novel, the man suffers from various forms of insomnia and night terror, most notably at the very beginning of the novel, as the man is introduced to us in the midst of a nightmare, having visions of a vague impending doom lurking in the shadows, characterized by white misty eyes, a vision he wakes up from to introduce the reader to the scorched world he inhabits.
One of the other symptoms most notable in the book is the avoidance of people, and while this is present in the novel for far different reasons than usually encountered in everyday life, the avoidance of people in the novel is more of a precaution and necesessity than a symptom of a disorder, as the man’s suspicions of other people prove founded as the novel draws on. The new world the man and boy inhabit seems to be outside the boundaries of traditional psychological description, as the trauma the man has suffered far outstrips any of those encountered by anyone alive today. While the boy simply grows up in this world, the man has seen what came before, yet still struggles to keep going, not matter what the cost.