Obviously, as an investor who watches a fair amount of financial TV programs, I had heard of Jim Cramer. Between his show, “Mad Money” and his frequent appearances on CNBC, his Action Alerts Plus service (From thestreet.com) was one that I HAD to review, in order to see just how good the information was, and more importantly, how TIMELY the information was. After a month of using the newsletter, frankly, I was disappointed.The striking last paragraph, with its vivid imagery of trout hidden in deep mountain glens, offers a redemptive ending to what has been a story of awful indifference and destruction, where hope has eked out a meager, slight existence in the face of the ubiquitous destructiveness of human nature, which has both caused the catastrophe and perpetuated the evils in the world afterward. The boy's rescue by a family of "good guys" might be read as an ironic ending with hope in the face of disaster, where somehow the good-guy fire persists. The result is optimistic resilience, a hope against hope, which offers humans an existential choice about how they want to live, whether or not human nature and physical nature make those choices easy or hard.Both the man and his wife understand that in this post-apocalyptic environment, they are likely to be brutalized at the hands of rapists, murderers, and cannibals. The wife considers death to be a needed relief from these threats. To the contrary, the father considers death an abhorrent threat that would prevent him from protecting his son; his commitment to life drives him on the journey south to ensure his son's survival. The man's wife responds to the catastrophic circumstances by committing suicide and avoiding whatever gruesome fate might befall her. Scavengers on the road choose to resort to murder, thievery, and cannibalism in order to survive. For them, humanity, kindness, and empathy are greatly diminished, it seems, although many of them continue to live in groups. The man and the boy, however, choose to scavenge and refrain from harming others unless violence is absolutely necessary to their survival.

What is the significance of "the fire" to the man and the boy?

That the man and the boy internally "carry the fire" signifies that they are the "good guys." Upon his deathbed, the man assures the boy that the fire can be found within the boy. The fire represents internal human strength in the form of qualities such as hope, perseverance and resilience, as well as morality, the ability to retain one's humanity in the face of ultimate destruction and evil.

How do the protagonists distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys"? Are the protagonists indeed the "good guys"?

The man and the boy consider themselves good guys, which they tend to see as seeking survival without harming others. They only scavenge for food and supplies, but they try not to steal from others, and they punish those who steal from them. In contrast, the "bad guys" are willing to hurt, use, or murder others for their own benefit. Yet, a central conflict in the novel is between the boy’s idea of what good guys do, on the one hand, and what the father does, on the other hand, in being so afraid of others that he refuses to help them, and in more severely punishing others than the boy thinks is necessary.

How does the boy's relationship with his father change over the course of their journey?

The boy matures over the course of this journey, and his changing relationship with his father reflects this growing maturity. At the beginning of the novel, the boy looks to the father for knowledge and guidance, believing his father to speak the truth unequivocally. However, as he gains new experiences, the boy learns to use his own judgment and can assess somewhat better whether or not his father is telling the truth. He begins to question his father's honesty on such matters as whether or not they are truly the "good guys" and asserts his own opinion when