I just woke up so I'm not feeling totally introspective yet, but as for the love factor, I'm not quite sure that Christopher understands. Somewhere in the book he talks about love and how he knows for a fact that his father loves him because he takes care of him. I don't think, so far, that Christopher understands the feeling of love as much as he understands that people who do things for him do it because of this so-called "love". In short, I think that he just feels that love is something that people do, maybe like an occupation, even.