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The Road
Archimago at 5-22-2009 12:49 pm
I just finished The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Just like in All the Pretty Horses, he does a fantastic job of creating a world. He visits the same subject over and over, each time pulling out a little more detail. The sentences are creatively crafted.

It is the story of a father and son traveling the roads of a post apocalyptic wasteland, hiding from cannibals, scavenging for food. Everything is dead in this world, except for humans and one dog(heard but not seen).

The book raises questions about morality, love, and humanity, can they be kept when all else is lost.

I did not like this book. It isn't the bleakness of it that turns me off. I can handle bleak. It isn't the lack of consistent punctuation. It is the lack of journey. A descent into Utter despair would have been acceptable. McCarthy robs us of even this. He hits a reset button that ends the book at the same place he was 4 chapters back.

I just expected more.


Comments (7)

nTYREE () says:
I read it quite a long time back. I liked it. The journey was the relationship between father and son in a dead world. I don't understand why you think that it ends back where it was four chapters earlier. It ends with the son finding salvation. The novel ceases to be bleak at all in the end, and is in fact, I think, maybe McCarthy's most hopeful book.
Archimago () says:
The reason I say that it ends where it was four chapters earlier is this:
The "Good Guy" that shows up at the end is just a replacement father. His interactions with the boy are identical to what the father's were.

So we end up with a boy being led by a man through a dead world.


nTYREE () says:
ah, but not through a dead world. They go to a camp with people, where there are trout in the stream and we are given to think that this is a new world being built (maps of the world in its becoming)...
Archimago () says:
There were no trout in the streams. He speaks of the trout in past tense.
"Once there were brook trout in the streams..."

I think he is trying to emphasize the scope of what man had destroyed.

"In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery"

There may me a possibility of life continuing, but not man.
nTYREE () says:
I didn't read it that way at all. It seems (working from memory) that he is describing a trip through the glen, and that he is saying that once (when they passed the stream) there were trout. It seems clear that the boy has seen them. If I was at home I would read the entire passage again
Archimago () says:
I can see how you could read it that way.

The way it is written though is to the reader.
"you could see them standing in the amber current..."
Not "they could see them..."

"They smelled of moss in your hands..."

The only other times in the book that McCarthy directly addresses the reader like this is when talking about things long past..
nTYREE () says:
damn. I can see your interpretation. It's been a long while since I read it, so I have to rely on my memory here. What I described above is how I remember reading it, but I could have remembered wrong or misinterpretated...
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