Okay: The Road and The Good Guys' Adulthood Code

As the man and his eleven-year-old son walk through a post-apocalyptic wasteland in The Road, the dying father has to learn anew what it is to be adult in order to be able to pass that knowledge on to his son. In the novel, screenplay, and film alike the word "okay" is used in the dialogue in dramaturgical rhythms to emphasize thematically relevant instances. In this article, the hero's journey is applied as a structure together with a set of markers of adulthood to compare the rhetoric progression of adulthood in, above all, the screenplay and novel. The article concludes that the versions of The Road employ different rhetorical strategies to form distinct and complementing arguments about what it is to be adult.