6. What other remarks might you have about the books?

The Road by Cormac McCarthy interested me a lot. The story seemed to begin with dreams about all of the things that he yearned for, but then as the story progressed the man seemed to become less focused on his dreams and the author seemed to include them less and less. I agree with the man when he said that, “The right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death.” In the situation that the man and the child were in, where they lived every day in fear of dying, dreaming would just bring them closer to depression and closer to giving up. The man could not allow himself to give up because he had to bring his son to safety. The man would force himself to wake up from those dreams of anything but peril, however he also stressed that there was nothing he could do about daydreams. I noticed that a lot of his dreams, whether they were day or night dreams, revolved around a woman, whom I assumed was his late wife. As the story continued they progressively got darker. In the beginning of the story he dreamed of a wedding, and a concert hall. All of these were happy times that he spent with his wife, however after this it moved on to the sudden disaster that struck the earth, and then her suicide. I enjoyed how the author seemed to tell us the past through the dreams. I do not think that he could have pulled off actually going back in time in any other way. If he had actually gone back in time in anything other than a memory, I do not think that it would have allowed me to understand the man. The dreams let me really understand the reasons that he was living, and they helped me see that he was human as well. Even though at times he could seem cold, he was really someone would had been through a lot and had experienced immense pain and suffering. The dreams really allowed me to get an insight on the man’s life before he began to travel with his son, and it allowed me to understand him and why the author made him the way he was.