The Road Post 1

4. Consider both novels. What do you notice about the treatment of women? The characterization of women? Or the omission of women? What might it suggest or signify in either novel?

In The Road, there are nearly no women. The book centers around a father and son, but the mother has been gone for some time. The father thinks back to the time before her suicide, and it seems to me that that was a time of more security, and happiness. This harsh road of survival that the man and the boy travel isn’t really a place for family, and I believe that is what a large part of what McCarthy was getting at, and why he left out women. Had the mother been there, there would have been a completely different group dynamic, and the feeling of the entire book would have been altered. To me, women in this book seem to represent a home. When the boys mother killed herself, he lost everything he had of a home, and he and his father were left trying to make their way and survive. In the end, after the boy’s father has died, the boy is essentially taken in by another family. Here, we meet another woman. McCarthy wrote:

The woman when she saw him put her arms around him and held him. Oh, she said, I am so glad to see you. She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didnt forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all time. (286)

Women, in this story, seem to represent a home, or the lack there of. It seems to me that in finding this family, and adding the presence of a woman to his life once more, the boy has found a new family of sorts, and with them found a new home.