The Road--Cormac McCarthy (Post 1 [for me])

"Packets of seeds. Begonia. Morning Glory. He stuck them in his pocket. For what?" (132) And later: "He twisted the cap off the gascan and he made a small a paper spill from one of the seedpackets" (135) These lines tortured me. The book is very repetitive: walking south, sleeping, eating canned food, encounter with evil. Over and over, varying order, but the same events happened again and again. The driving force of the book is the father's relationship with his son. Their driving force is their move south. Whenever the boy asks about the future the answer is 'South.' This is their only hope--the only thing they could come up with. But when they found those seeds the repetition was broken for me and i realized: they shouldn't be living can to can, moving south and finding food. Their quest should be for seeds. So when he found those flower seeds, did not search for food seeds, and later used the packet to light a flame, i was aghast. Isn't ash a known fertilizer? There is an agriculture technique called "slash and burn." I think the author created this perfect situation for starting new life purposefully because this was one of many seed references. From the grains the father eats off a barn floor, to the wrinkled apples they eat seeds and all there were countless opportunities to start new life. This taught me how we think about hope. Hope always seems to have one source. "X is the only hope." And this book had me totally convinced that moving South was the only physical hope for the two characters and their love for each other was their only mental hope. This is how the characters felt too, and they had convinced themselves that there was no hope besides the two sources they had already come up with. As an outside observer i was constantly looking for other sources and found one. But i think in our own lives we tend to narrow our hopefullness to focus on one thing. "My only hope for succeeding in life is college" or "My only hope for getting married is the first person i fall in love with" The author exposes this quality of human thought by making his characters focus blindly on one source of hope, causing them to miss out on a far great opportunity.