In The Road both the man and the world are in bad shape. When describing these two misfortunes McCarthy had a very distinct pattern. The man was always dying, but the world is described as already dead, yet currently sick. On the first page in the book McCarthy describes the role of night as “the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” (1) And soon after, during the day,the air is filled with “the ashes of the late world.” (11) So there you have both the dead world and the sickly world. Another example is the boy and man wearing those paper masks that protect from airborne contagious diseases to filter ash. This
patterns confused me quite a bit. Was the author trying to imply that there was hope for the world but none for the man, or that, like after the death of the world, after the death of the man life would go on, just tainted with sickly sadness like ash. Or am I over-reading this pattern and it is simply that life must always end, just as the man says when the boy asks him if they will die “Sometime” (10) whereas the inanimate, rock earth will only truly die when it is blown into a million pieces? Still, there is something really eery about thinking of the world as sick. In real life our world is certainly sick, and I suppose it has already sort of died as well or else dinosaurs would be more common. So maybe McCarthy is trying to create those parallels with phrases like “the cold, autistic dark” (15)
This pattern in McCarthy’s language is one of many, and even if he never meant his word patterns to double as symbols, he certainly meant to create a style and mood in the book with words readers could relate to. The words he chose made the book seem less like science fiction and more like realistic fiction. Few words in the book were made-up, there was no confusing made-up science or sketchy explanations like in a Star Trek episode. The combination of a setting that was basically a destroyed version of exactly my own with words right out of our world used to describe the aspects of the world in the book that were unlike the real world made The Road a book that sucked me in, captivated me, and spit me back out significantly disturbed.
1 comment:
I definitely agree with your reasoning about the genre of this book. When trying to classify it for myself, the first thing that came to mind was science fiction, but I had trouble really convincing myself that that's what it was. Although it was set somewhere in the future like the traditional sci-fi book or television show, it lacked all those futuristic weapons and technological advancements that are, at least in my mind, what really define the genre. At the same time, I don't wanna call it realistic fiction either because then the events in this story seem like they could realistically happen in our lifetime. Since that's too scary for me, I'm siding with sci-fi.
I too had thoughts about the relationship between death of man and death of planet while reading. I was more focused on how we as humans consider the world 'dead' once humans are gone, but it's only because we won't be there to see for ourselves that the planet is very much still alive. This book made me wonder what will happen to life of all things on earth if another meteor-and-dinosaur situation were to happen--just like I wonder what'll happen to the world portrayed in McCarthy's book once every human has perished. Will life rebuild?
I guess we'll never know for certain... considering we won't be around to witness it.
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