Eng 1302 - the Road

Noemi Amaya

Professor Helmer

English 1302

December 9, 2010

"The Road"

In the novel, "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy's, the main character, the father, whose preoccupation in life is to keep his son alive in a post nuclear landscape. There are basically only two characters in this book, and neither of them is named. There is a man (whose age is not given) and a young boy, who is the man's son. The son calls the man "Papa." This the only way I can draw a conclusion that the man is the father. The story is told from a third person perspective. The man is very resourceful and is able to gather enough material to make a collection of items he could possibly use as tools and puts them in the grocery cart where he carries their supplies. The opposing characters are the Barbarian in the bushes that stumbles upon the father and son in the bushes, and attempts to grab the boy. He is a cannibal. The Thief that tries to steal the son's supplies and the father forces him to return the goods. The Wife (unnamed) dies before the novel begins. She was the mother of the boy and chose to take her own life in which they struggled to survive. The clock stopped at 1:17am as if a nuclear was had just occurred. There was really no sunlight and, and everything was pretty much ash. It seemed like a nuclear winter had just occurred. Even the water in rivers was foaming with ashes. And the father was sick, and he knew he was dying. I figured he had radiation poising. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the "good guys," carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are "bad guy," cannibals who eat babies. In order to live, they must keep moving amid this shadowy landscape, in which ashes have all but obliterated the sun. The scene before him reveals ash from a post-nuclear holocaust falling from the sky and drifting across the landscape. The father and son are survivors, fighting to live in a world that has been destroyed by nuclear bombs and ravaged by chaos and confusion. A reason to why the father and boy are not named is because the author is trying to get an emotional grit of impassioned and tenacious relationship that is held firmly by the readers' heart and soul. The heart of who is reading the story will put the pieces together. There is never a doubt what the son means to the father, however. From the third paragraph of the novel, as he is "watching the ashen daylight congeal over the hand [,] he knew only that the child was his warrant" (p.4). Towards the end, the man and the boy are heading south because it will hopefully be warmer. "The Road" is supposed to represent the smallest chance of hope that humanity has left, which is why he manages to survive in the end. He was able to spend the time on the road with his father, learning, understanding, so he can sacrifice - which he did, he sacrificed his father and his personal hope for humanity in order to build humanity for the future, and thus he is a Christ figure. The novel is definitely a story of both despair and hope.

Can I ask you something

Yes of course

Are we going to die?

Sometime. Not Now (p.2)

It throws you into feelings of despair then raises you into the clouds of hope, and carries you along waves of inspiration.

It is clear the style used in Hemingway and McCarthy are rather intriguing. Hemingway portrays a style of Psychological in his short stories, "Hills Like White Elephants," and "A Clean, Well Lighted Place." In the short story "Hills Like White Elephants," for instance while the couple are waiting for the train to Barcelona and sit at a table, Jig "looks off at the line of hills" and notes that they look like white elephants, but the man replies without interest while he drinks his beer:

I've never seen one, "the man drank his beer.

No, you wouldn't have.

I might have, "the man said. "Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything (192).

She is trying to escape her thoughts by drinking absinthe and he becomes angry that he cannot expand his thinking.