Interesting thoughts, though I think there are more pedestrian answers to some of your questions.
For starters, the ash in the atmosphere means that no stars are visible, and likely never will be for at least a generation. On a purely practical level, the sextant has no potential use to the man or his son, save as a toy which the boy would have sooner or later discarded, as he did all the other toys he picked up along the way.
The reverence the man has for the device is understandable; I am not in any way nautically inclined, but even I am fascinated by sextants (as well as any other well-crafted device) when I see them. Moreover, it exhibits the best of our capabilities: precision, detail, beauty.
In fact, now that we're giving this some thought, it is one of the most perfect literary symbols I've ever encountered. One of my profs, I can't remember which, gave us the idea that Story is "what happened," whereas Plot is how the Story is revealed to the reader - The words we read in The Maltese Falcon, the murdered partner, Spade's dealings with Cairo et al, are the plot, whereas the Story is what he is chasing; the Story is the reason for the Plot. I'm not sure why I felt the need to lay that out here, but I think it's a relevant consideration anyways.
The purpose of a sextant is to guide a ship over a seascape whose surface features never change; there are no useful landmarks at sea, unlike say, crossing a mountain pass. The realization by the ancients that there is an order to the universe which surrounds us, and that the stars could be used for guidance if you looked at them closely and in the right way, opened up exploration and gave intrepid sailors a degree of mastery of their own fate. With a sextant, you can guide your ship and its passengers safely in to port.
I have never thought much about sextants before, but when you think about it, it competes with the printing press as the most important invention in human history. Imagine being on a ship without knowledge of sextants and how they work, and day after day seeing nothing but endless sea around you while that madman at the ship's helm will not listen to reason. Then imagine being the captain or the navigator, sighting the sun at noon and the stars at night, seeing that same seascape every day but knowing exactly, precisely where you are, where you're going, and when you'll get there. Even thinking about it is heady.
As such, the sextant is the last signpost before the border between the old world and the new, just as the man straddles the two worlds, having grown to manhood in the old world and survived in the new, both in the conventional and Darwinian sense through his son. The scene where he sees the distant flashes an immediately starts running the bath is telling: he understands immediately what has happened and what it means, and as such is as prepared as anyone is able to be for what's coming.
What I mean by this is that the sextant is (was) perfectly evolved by the old world from its earliest antecedent, the much simpler quadrant, which can be improvised from a piece of paper by anyone armed with the most basic bronze age principles of geometry and astronomy.
And that's where McC's invokation of the sextant proves brilliant: there are no stars. The cataclysm, the exact nature of which is never revealed, has knocked the world back on a scale scarcely imaginable - back to the stone age, back to a state where the wheel and control of the fire which they carry is the best we can muster. Assuming that humanity does survive in some form, the knowledge which enables the use of the sextant will have long atrophied by the time the stars come back. The sextant, even in its most simplified expression, is as dead as the world which birthed it.
And to complete my previous statement, the sextant was pefectly evolved by the old world, and is equally perfectly *useless* in the new. The man has already decided to not fill the boy's head with anything of the old world, and there is NO object or idea in the book more perfectly of the old world than the sextant, which unlike the other remnants, fuel, canned food, mattresses, has no potential use to the boy. At the same time, he reveres it, and to let the boy use and discard it as a toy would profane it.
The placement of objects has great relevance here. The only really good stash they find is buried in the ground - in a crypt, a grave - and they briefly stay there, and I think it would've been a pretty good gamble to pile up more trash around the entrance to that dugout and use up those stores completely before moving on. The ample food would have put some meat back on their bones, given them strength for whatever physical struggles they faced. But they were living, literally, in the dead and buried past, and I think they moved on because while the food would have nurtured them physically, the ease would have softened them and killed them once they left again. The mental discipline they would have sacrificed by staying was more important than being well-fed; indeed, constant hunger would be an essential motivation to survive.
Just as the bunker places the past and its bounty in a different physical space than the present, so does the shipwreck. The father and son both go in the water, but only the father goes to the boat. Only the father *can* go to the boat, because only he is of the world of which the boat is a pure product - technology, science, knowledge both modern and arcane.
When the man comes back out on deck, the boy is terrified by the different clothes he is wearing, themselves made of some modern material which soon won't exist. He is, in that moment, a man on the deck of a ship, equipped with the knowledge to use it as it was meant to be used, whereas the boy is a new, primitive life form, shivering on the shores of the ocean from which he has just emerged. The man is the distant future, the boy is the distant past, but circumstance has transplanted the two consciousnesses.
More importantly, as is so often the case with protagonists, the man is the liminal figure in the midst of everything: he exists on the beach with the boy and on the boat with the sextant, in the old world and the new, and he has to leave both the sextant and the boy behind, because you can't exist in two places at the same time.
This went on for a lot longer than I intended. I'm not even gonna reread it for my inevitable errors of tortured syntax right now, cause I let the machine get two calls while I rambled on. :>
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