6. What other remarks might you have about the books? Questions? Observations? Reactions?
As I was reading The Road, I realized how much this booked seemed to skip around. In one second “he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago. The boy watched him. What are you doing? he said.” (McCarthy:7), and in the next second while he is “a quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We’re not thinking, he said. We have to go back” (McCarthy:7). It goes from him dialing a number to suddenly being very far from where he just was, leaving you wondering what happened when he dialed that number.
At this point you still don’t understand where they are going and why they are going there and moving so quickly forward like this can get confusing but at the same time keeps you questioning and wanting to continue the book. I didn’t really understand what was happening for a large portion of the book besides the fact that they are heading south, there is basically no life left and no crops growing, and the boy and man don’t want anyone to see them. I just kept wondering why they were doing it and why the world was so dark.
It is also weird that the main characters are referred to as the boy and the man. They don’t have names, but you find out that they are related when the boy calls the man Papa.
2 comments:
I definitely agree with you - there were some parts of the book that dragged along with tedious details of simple actions. However, I also thought it was kind of freeing to not have to think about all the questions that the man and the boy never seemed to be able to answer. It really captured the one of the themes of the novel: the absolute desperation of the characters in the face of such bleak prospects. Notice how McCarthy often uses the words "gray" and "nothing" to describe the setting. There's really not much to motivate the story besides the pure love between the man and the boy that is so obvious in their actions.
I also agree. I have soooo many sticky notes on so many of my pages in my books , just because of confusion. The author didn't do to good with organization.
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