In The Road, there are cannibals, looters, and pilgrims. Who are the pilgrims?Infer characteristics of them from the text of the story. Are the...

In Cormac McCarthy's The Road, the
man and the boy are pilgrims carrying the fire.  The family that the boy meets in the
end is also made of pilgrims carrying the fire.  On this God-forsaken road in
post-Apacolyptic America, it seems that the nuclear family is fire in and of itself.
 These lone families are pilgrims not only in a quest for their own basic survival, but
for the future generations of humanity.  Without them, humankind is surely
doomed.

The man and the boy's first pilgrimage is to get to
the ocean, presumably because they think it will be a better climate for survival.  When
the father reaches the sea, he is disappointed to learn that the pilgrimage was in vain:
the ocean is no better than the mainland.

His ulterior
motive in this pilgrimage is to deliver the boy to a new father or family before he
dies.  But, the man does not trust anyone.  He even tells the boy to kill himself rather
than be taken alive by a looter or cannibal.  This pilgrimage is based on faith, and the
father clearly does have any faith left in others.  So, it's another pilgrimage in
vain.

His ultimate hope is for the boy to make his own
pilgrimage.  After the father dies, the boy indeed goes back onto the road and lets
himself be found by the man with the shotgun.  If his father were still alive, it's
doubtful the boy would have done this (his father would have hidden or run).  So, it is
the boy's pilgrimage back onto the road at the end--one that could have doomed him--that
is the greatest pilgrimage of all.  The boys restores his faith in humanity, and the
fire keeps a-goin'.