Father and Son

Barren wasteland, gray skies, cannibals roaming about.
Not exactly the best place for a kid to grow up.
In the book - "The Road" a father and son grow up in a post-apocalyptic land, where they fight everyday to find food, evade cannibals, and simply try to survive as humans, with no real goal.
As the story develops, we gradually learn about the child's relationship with his father, and how growing up in a place like this affects the boy.
The father tries his best throughout the story to try and protect his son from everything in the world that can harm him. In my opinion, it's because of the fact that he's not accustomed to this new world.
The father grew up in a "better" world than this, and he's teaching his son to live by morals and principles that he grew up learning. His principles however, may not be suited for this world. Some of his principles actually hinder their progress. For one, his refusal to resort to cannibalism even in the circumstances may seem admirable to us, but in their current reality, him and his son may actually die if he keeps holding on to principles like that. If his son continues to live after his father dies, living by these morals without the skills to actually survive by himself can only lead him to his death.