Why we have used pointer in this C program?

Why we have used pointer in this C code? Basically, I am just searching a string in the array, but without pointer, it is unable to run. But why is that?

int main() {

    char *x[] = {"ab", "bc", "cd", 0};

    char *s = "ab";

    int i = 0;

    while(x[i]) {

            if(strcmp(x[i], s) == 0) {
                    printf("Gotcha!\n");
                    break;
            }

            i++;
    }
}