updateghost's Full Review: Cormac McCarthy - The Road
They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put in your head are their forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You forget some things, dont you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
The above paragraph demonstrates exactly what makes The Road exceptional-----Cormac McCarthy's fragile, beautiful prose. The author ignores common grammatical rules because in a post-apocalyptic world, rules don't matter. Notice the broken form of sentences, as if the narrator is breathless, making a dire effort to get out his words-----striking a parallel to the world which he narrates.
The Road is about as dreary and bleak a novel that you'll find, and McCarthy ensures that it remains so. The novel is rife with words such as "black," "gray," "dark," "ash," "dead," "night," "cold," and "damp." As the protagonists trudge down the road, traveling south, hoping for some sense of warmth and security, hope seems almost nowhere to be found. Whenever another human being is crossed, only fear sparks within the man, the boy, and the reader.
One of The Road's key strengths is that McCarthy never clues us in on what exactly what has happened. The characters never know either-----at one point later in the novel, the man requests of someone, "Tell us where the world went." Given the apparent death of the world's animals and plants, it's probable that the world has reached a nuclear winter, but there are other possibilities. In the characters' setting, groups of men are trotting the country, using other men as food-----here McCarthy paints a dreadful portrait of mankind's inhumanity.
It is vastly imperative that McCarthy attach us to his heroes, and that he does. The relationship between the man and the boy is a loving and caring one, despite the man's occasional hardness towards others or the boy's naivete. It's clear that both of them have a good heart and are determined to defeat the world set against them, despite the odds. If there is any humanity in The Road, it is found in their connection.
When McCarthy's definitive final paragraph concludes, don't be surprised if you feel tears well up in your eyes. The Road is a powerful and poignant novel, and McCarthy's prose is about as symbolic and meaningful as writing comes. There have been myriad post-apocalyptic novels in the past, but The Road is one light in a world of literary murkiness.
The textbook, Road, by Cormac McCarthy, available in Hardback. Published by: Random House, Inc.. Edition: . ISBN10: 0307265439. ISBN13: 978030726...More at Textbooks.com
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