Thomas H. Schuab and The Road

I agree with Amanda's claim that "Those who lived in the “old world” will eventually die out like the Man, but I think the boy and others born after the apocalypse will not lose all intuition." The idea of this intuition seems to stem from Carl Yung's theory of the Collective Unconscious. Is it possible that though all traces of the old world may have disappeared, symbols such as darkness and light may stay the same? I believe that people who live in a world that is going through such a drastic change, will still respond to "darkness and light" as they might have in the old world, but symbols and archetypal patterns will be altered. As people grow accustomed to the dark, their response to it will be different. As people see the light, they may interpret it not only as a symbol of hope, but as a symbol of destruction, as the light of the fire is what has destroyed the world.
As Thomas H Schuab asserts, the very things people rely on to survive will be altered. In this new world, the characters eventually are forced to revert back to a life of simplicity, where "things were held in place, are held in place, by [merely] a web of words.”
A web of words seems to be so fragile, as if life depends only on the support of single, distinct meanings. Even if "there is no God," then people such as the boy and his father in The Road will emerge, with magnitude, and find something else to believe in, such as the love between father and son, or in the case of Housekeeping, letting the world be defined by a distinctive "set of words."
Even without a God, The Road is a spiritual journey: McCarthy even employs an "ironic echo of Adam and Eve departing Paradise" in the beginning of the novel to emphasize the magnitude of their journey. Even in the face of the barren "wasteland," the father and son are able to find something Godly in each other, as they both travel in the hopes of "carrying the fire"