Themes

A Key Theme in The Road  is morality. In this post-apocalyptic society, there are not many who have any morals left. Most people besides the Man and the Boy that we meet are robbers, murderers and cannibals. The two most extreme examples of people abandoning their morality are the house with the people locked in the cellar waiting to be eaten, and the headless body of an infant they find over a fire. The boy seems to be the only one left. Even Ely, the old man they met on the side of the road admits he would not have shared food with anybody else, and the boy did. This is somewhat curious, as one would expect that the morals of the old world would be more prevalent in those who had lived in it, but the boy does not remember what the world used to be like, and yet he strongly believes in helping people. The main question that should be in the reader's mind every time the man makes a decision to not help people is this; does a need for survival justify selfishness? That question of morality is clearly in the boy's head with Ely and the man who was struck by lightning, and likely there when they found the cellar with prisoners in it. (Although in that case the boy's fear might have taken over and made him want to leave as soon as possible) 

Style

The beginning of the road, as I previously stated, gave a summary-like feel. It involved the man and the boy making their way south, with not much happening overall. The way the beginning was written had an interesting effect on me as a reader. This has never happened to me before, but the way the book was dark, impersonal and slow for some reason made me imagine the events in black and white. I always visualize the events of books as I am reading, but usually I imagine real people, often people I know, as the characters. The first time I pictured the events in color was the first time a major event occurred in the book, which was the man shooting the "bad guy."  The second quarter of the book was far more exciting that the first in my opinion, and although the general style of writing remains the same, the reader's perception of the book (at least from my own experience) is far different. No longer a summary of two people travelling south, this is now an intense story that left me aching to read more. McCarthy's style of writing without quotation marks contributes greatly to the dark tone of the novel. One of the most surprising scenes in the book was when the man and the boy stumble upon a chamber where people are being kept to be eaten. I cannot put my finger on why, but it seems to me that the passage would have lost something had McCarthy taken a more orthodox approach to writing; 

Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. Jesus, he whispered. Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us. Christ, he said. Oh Christ. He turned and grabbed the boy. Hurry, he said. Hurry. He'd dropped the lighter. No time to look. He pushed the boy up the stairs. Help us, they called. Hurry. 

The almost casual approach at writing is interestingly affected when discussing such a dark subject. It makes the passage even more disturbing to me. Also, the lack of chapters helps to put the reader in the minds of the characters, in that there is no break to this hell. Chapters break up the story into small, manageable portions, and often in books some amount of time has passed in between chapters. The lack of chapters helps to remind the reader that this story is continuous and each new day in the story has the same goal for the main characters: survive.

Beginning

The Road: Blog #1

Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road follows a father and son attempting to survive in a post-apocalyptic future, where there is no longer a society of any kind, just roaming gangs of rapists and murderers. It has a format very different from most books, which contributes greatly to the bleak tone of the novel. In addition to the absence of quotation marks, the book has no chapters or sections. Without these things, the days within the book seem to blur together, and makes interactions between the man and the boy seem like summary. To me, this seems to solidify the idea that everyday life has lost its joy. 

The main characters in The Road are "The Man" and "The Boy", and neither are given proper names at any point. The man only continues to survive for the sake of the boy, and has said that if the boy were to die he would want to die as well. The man is focused solely on the boy's survival and refuses to help anyone else the come across. The boy however, wants to help those in need, although he is reminded by the man that that would mean risking their own survival by giving up supplies. He is clearly less accepting of the rules of this new way of life, and expresses suicidal thoughts at one point, saying that he just wants to be with his mother. The boy's mother is not in the book's main story, but a large portion of the book is the man remembering life before the end of the world, and she is repeatedly in these flashbacks. it is discovered that she left the man and boy so that she could die, as she did not want to go on living.

Most of the beginning of the book is simply the journey the man and the boy are making down south to escape the nuclear winter, there are a few interesting, exciting, and depressing portions. At one point, the two sleep in the cab of a large truck they find, and in the morning when they search the trailer, they find human bodies. The main plot point so far came at the end of the section I read. The boy and the man come across a gang in a truck, and one of the gang members attacks the son, forcing the man to use one of two bullets he has on the gang member. Although most of the first quarter of the book was slow, this added enough excitement to re-interest me in the novel.