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.