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The Road

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a post-apocalyptic tale that follows a father and son as they navigate through a desolate and brutal world. The story delves into themes of survival, humanity, and the unbreakable bond between parent and child. McCarthy's writing style, described as sparse and bleak, perfectly captures the grim and hopeless atmosphere of the dystopian setting, drawing readers into the harrowing journey of the protagonists.

Characters:

The characters, while unnamed, embody a deep emotional bond that drives the story forward amid a starkly dangerous environment.

Writing/Prose:

McCarthy's writing style is characterized by stark minimalism and disjointed dialogue, enhancing the novel's bleak atmosphere and emotional weight.

Plot/Storyline:

The story follows a father and son on a treacherous journey through a desolate, ash-covered landscape, representing the struggle for survival in a world of despair.

Setting:

The setting is a devastated world lacking life, characterized by ash-laden landscapes and subzero temperatures.

Pacing:

The pacing reflects the characters' slow, grinding struggle and contemplation of their existence, which can feel repetitive at times.
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone be...

Notes:

The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007, illustrating its literary significance.
The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic world where almost all life has been extinguished, creating a hopeless atmosphere.
The relationship between the father and son is central to the story, highlighting themes of love, hope, and survival.
McCarthy employs a sparse writing style, often omitting punctuation and using short, terse sentences, which contributes to the novel's bleak tone.
The setting features a landscape filled with ash and devoid of life, with descriptions of gray skies, dead trees, and constant cold.
The father and son are referred to only as 'the man' and 'the boy,' emphasizing their anonymity and universal struggle.
The book explores the idea of hope in a seemingly hopeless world, with the boy often representing innocence and goodness.
McCarthy does not reveal the cause of the apocalypse, which allows readers to focus on the characters' struggles rather than the event itself.
The narrative follows a linear path without chapters, reflecting the continuous journey of the characters down the road.
The ending of the book features a glimmer of hope when the boy is taken in by a family, leaving readers with mixed feelings about his survival.

Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings

Triggers and content warnings for The Road include depictions of cannibalism, suicide, violence, and overall themes of bleakness and despair.

From The Publisher:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

A New York Times Notable Book

One of the Best Books of the Year

The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star, Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice, The Washington Post

Ratings (395)

Incredible (98)
Loved It (144)
Liked It (78)
It Was OK (43)
Did Not Like (28)
Hated It (4)

Reader Stats (673):

Read It (391)
Currently Reading (1)
Want To Read (205)
Did Not Finish (10)
Not Interested (66)

20 comment(s)

Incredible
1 week

Yet another author I thought I've read a lot more from then I had. But it's great to have a big back catalog to explore. I've heard about The road before but wasn't much aware what it was about or that is actually was as great as I've heard. Bleak and emersive but at parts intense. Definitely going to read more of his

 
Incredible
3 weeks

Bleak, dark, challenging...I've never been so haunted by a book. Although you never learn the main characters' names, it makes them seem all the more real. I kept thinking about them long after I put the book down.

 
Did Not Like
1 month

Says it way better than I ever could: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/19226230

 
Incredible
2 months

Every time I think about this book I feel a rush of emotion. It is one of those books I want to recommend to everyone I meet. McCarthy is maddeningly vague about the events leading up to the main action, and yet I felt a deep relevance to the times we live in. It takes on almost every major theme of literature without being smarmy or cliched. In addition to being brilliant contemporary literature, it just makes me want to compare notes with other readers -- I could talk about this book forever but I'll stop now.

 
Loved It
3 months

Reread this— contemplating teaching it.

 
It Was OK
3 months

What a disappointment. I have been wanting to read this one forever!

Boring. No plot. No characterization. No dialogue. No background. This book is not even scary!

Then...it is also chock-full of pseudo-deep philosophical lines like this: "Who is it? said the boy. I dont know. Who is anybody?"

I was laughing out loud at moments like that, but I don't think this is supposed to literary satire, is it?

I was ready to shoot that boy who all he did was cry and say he was cold.

This book makes no sense whatsoever.

I would have not finished it, but I was waiting to see how long until I cared or something happened. At 98% I slightly cared.

I actually like McCarthy's writing style, stark prose, but it is much better suited for poetry or a short story. 200+ pages of this was torture, not a Pulitzer-Prize winning novel.

 
Incredible
3 months

En un mundo desolado un padre y un hijo se tienen el uno al otro.

Entiendo que la parte del mundo desolado echa a mucha gente para atras. Pero creo que el conflicto del hombre para intentar aislar al niño del sufrimiento causado por el mundo es muy real y esta muy bien explorado.

Hay escenas de verdadera tension y las conversaciones son muy naturales.

El final es lo unico que me parecio flojo.

 
Liked It
5 months

This is an okay book for the dystopian genre. I never got a chance to figure out what happened to the world and what let the people to such savagery. Kinda heartbreaking the more they explore and the less they find; they slowly start to come to terms that there’s nothing left in the world.

 
Loved It
6 months

The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.

I’m not typically of the opinion that a novel hangs on its ending. Sometimes an ending can be shocking, but usually, even if surprising or unexpected, it’s a logical extension of the rest of the book and can neither save a bad book nor ruin a good one. But in this case, the ending of

The Road made the whole novel work for me: it provided purpose and direction (and

a sense of hope

) that the rest of the book doesn’t have, except in the most literal sense, and turned a confusing, likely un-rateable book into one that I can confidently give 4 stars.

The Road lives up to its reputation as being heavily stylized. McCormac omits apostrophes in contractions (

dont, wouldnt—but not

it’s) and hyphens in some words (

homecanned, diningroom). There are no chapters, just paragraphs, most spaced as if it is a scene all unto itself unless there’s a section of dialogue. There are no quotation marks, only line breaks. Sentence fragments abound. Reading it feels appropriately exhausting, monotonous, unending, and bleak. The vocabulary is rich, and the atmosphere is intensely cold, ashy, and gray. It’s filled with passages like

He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination.

and sentences like

The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.

and I can’t tell if that’s brilliant or pretentious, but it’s undeniably unique and strangely captivating.

The characters have no names: there are just the man, the boy, and the road. The novel is spent walking down the road, looking for anything to eat, struggling to light fires at night for warmth, and trying to avoid the few other living people, whether they seem harmless or (more commonly) are dangerously violent. Occasionally they’ll find a place worth exploring—a home, a truck, a boat—which provide much-needed variety to the setting. The man is cold and calloused and will do anything to protect his very young son; the boy is, somehow, still sweet and innocent. There’s a horrific scene that throws things into sharp perspective when

the man and boy are hiding from a group of people, and the man gives the boy a gun:

If they find you you are going to have to do it. Do you understand? Shh. No crying. Do you hear me? You know how to do it. You put it in your mouth and point it up. Do it quick and hard. Do you understand? Stop crying. Do you understand?

The man believes that the boy’s compassion is weakness, but seems to realize that it is also all that is left of their humanity and so is constantly conflicted whether it should be preserved or eradicated: it is this conflict on which their relationship hinges.

Famously, the world is indelibly bleak, and two scenes in particular—you know the ones—seem like they go too far, past “worldbuilding” and into the realm of the needlessly graphic, inserted for shock value and little else. I could have done without reading that.

As I mentioned, though, it was the ending that really won me over. McCarthy seems to have a relentlessly, and I’d argue unrealistically, pessimistic view of humanity: it is violent and dark and in desperate need of redemption. And the ending

provides that redemption: the man may have died, but he succeeds in securing a future for his son. Even in the terrible world of this novel, good people do exist. There is hope, and kindness, and a chance at love and happiness. This was not in any way the ending that I was expecting, which I’d thought would be as nihilistic and cold and harsh as the rest of the book. Instead, I find light and redemption: in this world, in this novel, and in McCarthy. And, stylistically, the ending is also a departure, as it harkens back to a vibrant, idyllic past that may yet be out there for the boy and his new family:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

I’m still unsure whether I’ll read anything else from this author; I don’t think I can handle anything more horrific than this (which was a stretch itself). But

The Road was a fantastic reading experience, and not one that I’m likely to forget.

Some favorite passages:

Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind. A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadow-lands stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned.

Just remember that the things you put into your head are there 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.

And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day.

He stood on a stone bridge where the waters slurried into a pool and turned slowly in a gray foam. Where once he’d watched trout swaying in the current, tracking their perfect shadows on the stones beneath.

The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I've taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.

Death is not a lover.

Oh yes he is.

Then they set out down the road again.

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable.

There is no God and we are his prophets.

Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you.

The country went from pine to liveoak and pine. Magnolias. Trees as dead as any. He picked up one of the heavy leaves and crushed it in his hand to powder and let the powder sift through his fingers.

There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead.

He thought about the boy and his concerns and after a while he said: You're probably right. I think they're probably dead. Because if they were alive we'd be taking their stuff. And we're not taking their stuff.

You're not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldnt understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

The road bent its way along the coast, dead sheaves of saltgrass overhanging the pavement. The leadcolored sea shifting in the distance. The silence.

The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake.

Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

The wreckage of buildings strewn over the landscape and skeins of wire from the roadside poles garbled like knitting.

 
Did Not Like
7 months

McCarthy is a brilliant writer. He'll also burn the will to live right out of you. Usually, his combination of beauty and abject horror results in stunning work that I can't help but love despite the pain, but this one crossed the line for me.


It's a personal thing, though. I read it as a new parent, with all the turmoil and hormones and sleep deprivation that implies. Not a great decision, given the plot. It affected me deeply enough and negatively enough that even now, years later, I absolutely will not be revisiting this novel to see if my response has changed over time. My original experience is still that vivid, no refresher is needed.

 
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About the Author:

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist, screenwriter, and playwright who has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

 
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