“Goodbye” is a word that we use often. We use it on the phone, when we go our separate ways with friends and family. At the end of “The Road,” the boy wants to say bye to his father, “What about my papa?/There’s nothing else to be done/I think I want to say goodbye to him/Will You be all right?/Yes” (285-286). For the little boy, this was the last time he would ever see him, it was not a kind of “goodbye” that we use in our everyday language. According to Oxford Dictionary, it is, “used to express good wishes when parting or at the end of a conversation.”
In one of Carrie Underwood’s songs, “Starts With Goodbye,” she sings,
I guess it's gonna have to hurt,
I guess I'm gonna have to cry,
And let go of some things I've loved,
To get to the other side,
I guess it's gonna break me down,
Like falling when you try to fly,
It's sad, but sometimes moving on with the rest of your life,
Starts with goodbye.
The boy is moving on with the rest of his life after his father dies. He is starting a whole new chapter in his life with this new family that he does not know very well. He has to end up trusting them and depending on them just like he did with his father for basically his whole life. He has to let go and it did break him down. This is significant because throughout the book, he is with his father who keeps him alive and protects him to the best of his ability and now he finally has to say goodbye to him. Before reading this text, I had not really thought of this word like this. To me, goodbye meant not seeing the person for a while, but not forever. Thankfully, I have never had to say bye to someone who meant a lot to me, but at such a young age, I cannot imagine how it felt to him especially since he was the only other person in his life.
"Oxford Dictionaries ." Oxford University Press, 2011. Web. <http://english.oxforddictionaries.com /definition/goodbye?region=us>.
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