Entry #7: AP Prompt

In Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, a man and his son travel across the the eastern United States.  Along the way the man threatens and punishes people for their actions rather vindictively, while the boy is lenient and overzealous.  They both believe they understand justice, but neither are entirely correct.  They practice injustice on the extreme ends of the spectrum.

Together, the man and the boy “carry the fire”.  They believe that they are the good guys and that their actions in this world are moral and justified.  However, the man often becomes selfish in his pursuit of survival.  He steals food, and uses resources which are presumably others’, and severely punishes those who wrong him.  He is often too consumed by his instinct to survive, and rejects concepts such as benevolence.  McCarthy establishes him as a loving father to the boy, but a fiercest enemy to everyone else.  He even severely distrusts an old man named Ely, who he met travelling on the road.  Ely had tattered clothes, brittle bones, and no possessions, yet the man stills finds something to dislike, simply because he thinks Ely has ulterior motives.  In this way he commits large injustices to his fellow humans and to his own cause of carrying the fire.
The boy becomes the moral center of the novel.  While his sense of justice is better, he is often too kindhearted and naive.  If he was in control, no one would pay for their actions, which is not justice.  The boy has trouble adapting to the world and becoming what he needs to be to survive on his own. The boy takes pity on Ely, and sees him for what he is, a tired old man. He questions his fathers morality when he loots houses for food that isn't his. But on several occasions he does not stop looters from taking his possessions, and takes pity on them when his father makes the looters pay.

Both the boy and the man have their extremes, but together they are just and fair.  They balance each other out, allowing them to continue to live in the desolate post-apocalyptic world of The Road.

Entry 6: The End of The Road

See what I did there? Pretty funny.....

Anyway, after 241 pages of starvation, pain, anguish, mistrust, suicide, infanticide, and cannibalism, the man's journey has come to an end, much to the boy's dismay.  His cough finally caught up to him.

"He slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff.  He sat there a long time weeping and then he got up and walked out through the woods to the road.  When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again."

Devastated, the boy stays with his papa for days.  However, just when it looked like all hope was lost for the boy, a glimmer of light finally pierced the darkness.  A man emerges to talk to the boy.

As Guy Pierce's character states, the boy has two choices.  He can stay where he is, and most certainly die while protecting his father's corpse, and take a leap of faith, and leave with him.  The entire book McCarthy teaches us to distrust human beings, and then in the most important scene of the book, we must place all hope in a stranger.  This reveals two pieces of information.  The first is that in no way is the boy prepared for life on his own.  No matter how hard his father tried, he is too young, too weak, and too inexperienced.  His father failed him.

The second is that in situations of life and death, you have to take a chance.  Without that stranger coming along, the boy would die very quickly.  Yet, if he goes with the stranger, it would go against everything his father taught him, and he most certainly be killed.  McCarthy uses this Catch 22 situation effectively to put strain on the reader and the boy.

The ending is hopeful, shifting in tone dramatically from the bleakness of the rest of the film, and presenting a future for the boy in which he is not savagely murdered, but loved and protected.  This juxtaposition of his life with his father with his life with the stranger's family forces the reader to realize and uncomfortable truth.  The man was wrong about people.  There are good ones out there, who are also carrying the fire.

Entry 5: Influence and Adaptions of The Road

Not much analysis here, just thought it would be fun the write this as a bonus.

The Road was originally published back in 2006, almost ten years ago.  Since then, post apocalyptic media has jumped in popularity, and it's hard to believe that a quality work of fiction such as this is not responsible for creating some of the hunger for similar works.

The influence of The Road is prevalent in many works of post apocalyptic fiction.  Rather than continue with action oriented, sci-fi cheese fests (see: Terminator, Mad Max, etc.) , these stories have become more character focused.  This includes the books I Am Legend (also primary between two characters in the apocalypse) and the Russian novel Metro 2033.  Television and Movies have not been impervious to the post-apocalyptic craze.  The Walking Dead, Jericho, The Book of Eli are examples of this.  Hell, even video games are participating in the craze.  Day Z requires you to do constant resource management, I Am Alive contains a very similar aesthetic, and the masterpiece The Last of Us, which for all intensive purposes, is the video game version of The Road, focusing on the relationship between a bitter man hardened by the tough world, and a young girl full of energy and innocence.

Three years after the novel's publication, the film adaption of The Road received a limited US release. While strong on its own merits, it has quite a few differentiation from the novel.  The man's wife plays a much bigger role than in the novel.  She is stubborn and forceful, ultimately taking her own life and leaving her son and husband to travel the road.  The most disturbing scene in the book was also cut out of the movie.  My guess is the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) would not allow a charred, headless baby corpse to be shown in theaters.  It doesn't make sense that it would be cut out to not off-put audience because the final cut was one of the most bleak and dreary films ever made.

The adaption is well done and preserves McCarthy's key themes: survivalism and the importance of family.  The performances are all great, and the cinematography more than adequately captures the imagery of the gray world described throughout the novel.  Anyone who's still reading this blog, give it a watch.

Entry 4: What's the point?

Three quarters of my way through The Road, and McCarthy is still bringing his A game, stenciling in a world full of tragedy, atrocities, and rotting remains.  A key device in the novel so far has been word choice.  Refreshingly, the novel decides not to burden the reader with a multitude of strange and obscure words.  It's rather simple presentation allows the reader to fine tune the details in their head, rather than have them decided for you.  Strangely, it helps create some of the most simple yet disturbing images for the reader.  The end of the second act brings about the most chilling imagery yet.

While continuing down the road our two protagonists felt they were being watched, so they ducked to the side to observe for a bit.  Sure enough, a group of four survivors, three men and one pregnant woman, walked by.  The next day the boy and the man continued into a clearing where they had spotted smoke.

"He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him.  He looked quickly to see what had happened.  What is it? he said.  What is it?  The boy shook his head.  Oh Papa, he said.  He turned and look again.  What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit."

What we have here is the holy grail of disturbing images.  Themes of cannibalism, rape and infanticide, impressively fit into one paragraph.  After the horrid pet-human meat locker scene, I didn't think McCarthy could top himself, but by-god he did it.  Even the thought of using a woman essentially to farm meat is absolutely repulsive.  After settling my stomach, one question seemed to be locked in my mind.  Is living in this world worth it?

McCarthy makes arguments for both, although one seems stronger than the other.  As the man and the boy conversed in the early sections of the book, that in a world so empty of happiness and pleasure, the only thing keeping them alive is each other.  Each of them without the other, would give up trying.  It's hard to imagine that McCarthy himself is not close with his family, because this whole book rests on the idea that family is the only thing that matters.  Everything else is secondary: material items, leisure, and even necessities like food.

On the other hand, is there any quality of life anywhere in this world?  All life (save for a few special humans) has been annihilated, you are in a constant state of fear, hunger and confusion, and the world is cold and ashen.  Void of expectations of our contemporary society (a loving family, friends, job opportunities), its easy to ask yourself what it is exactly that the boy has to live for besides his father.  Maybe there is nothing else worth it.  Maybe that's the point.

Still, the trudging day in and day out towards the coast is exhausting and may ultimately be fruitless, especially because the motif of the man's cough is getting more and more frequent.  The cough represents his weakness, his inability to prepare his child for the world they live in.  With each of his failures, it becomes more common.  It also functions as a clock, ticking down until it will ultimately stop.  McCarthy foreshadows heavily, creating a sense of tension every time the man keels over in pain, as we know the boy may be getting closer to a world without his father.  With a potential death of the man on the horizon it will be interesting to see how quickly the boy can adapt in the last quarter of the novel.  Carrying the fire may get much harder for him very soon.

Entry 3: Carrying the Fire

In a book chock full of rotting and decrepit corpses, one person is carrying the fire.

No, it is not the man, but rather the boy!

As opposed to the man, whose soul has been ravaged by the world around him, the boy is still young, and remains the moral center of the novel.  He, unlike his father, is always thinking about how their actions will affect others, while the man strictly thinks about survival.  Even when on the brink of death, starving in the cruel cold world, when the two of them find a shelter of food he still questions whether they should eat it or not.  The man can be cold-hearted and unforgiving, while the boy is empathetic towards others, even those who try to wrong him (mild nudity).  In this scene especially, the father's emotional disconnect from other humans and his loss of humanity are very apparent.  He takes everything away from a many who is just like him: cold, alone, dying.  Inversely, the boy is appalled.  His selflessness is a pertinent point, especially because of The Road's choice to mostly follow two main characters.

The boy has also proven himself to be more keen in certain situations, such as at the cannibal house. It was a haunting scene in the movie (scene is disturbing viewer discretion advised), and its influence is just as strong in the book.  He warns his father over and over not to enter the house, yet he enters anyway because he feels they need to find food.  Well sorry chief, that one didn't work out so well. Better luck next time.

I continue to enjoy this book tremendously as I pass the half-way point of the novel.  While I do already know the major plot points, there are enough differences to satisfy me.  But that's a topic for an entirely separate entry.  

Entry 2: A Man and a Boy: The Characters of The Road

Well, it seems as though the world in Cormac McCarthy's The Road just keeps getting worse.  In my reading since my first post, as the man and the boy have continued their journey to the coast, it just keeps getting colder.  Snow is falling, wind is blowing, and our protagonists are beaten by an unrelenting mother nature.  Ned Stark once said "Winter is coming".  No Ned, winter is nigh.

There are two protagonists in The Road, and not much else.  McCarthy yolos so hard on this novel, he doesn't even give them names.  But don't worry, there is a reason.  They are simply refereed to as The Boy, and The Man.

The Man is a hardened, sympathetic, and protective individual.  In an unforgiving world, he tries to protect his family at all costs, even against their will sometimes.  During flashbacks it is explained that he had a wife who thought it better to commit suicide than to live in the apocalypse.  While it is horrifying to us, McCarthy does a good job at making us understand her point of view.  She is simply worried about the safety of her family.  In an argument with the man about a gang of bandits, she explains her point of view.

"Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us.  The will rape me.  They'll rape him.  They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it.  You'd rather wait for it to happen." (48) 

She does not believe the man can possibly protect them from the evils of the world they live in.  The novel is about his attempt to prove the woman he desperately misses wrong.  Along with his love for his son, it drives him on in the toughest of times, and there are some tough times.  He does not survive for himself, he does it only for his child.

The boy is the source of light and hope in an otherwise solemn world.  He represents ignorance and foolishness, but also compassion and kindness.  While his father only thinks about their survival, the few times they meet others on the road he feels the need to help them, even if his father resists.  He loves his fatherly deeply, but he also worries about him, and what the world has turned him into.  He sees weakness in his father that he cannot see himself.

Ultimately, The Road is story about the power of  the father-son connection.  Leaving them unnamed makes his biggest statement: these man and the boy could be anyone.  The genius of this decision is that it lets the readers insert people from their lives into the place of the man and the boy, making it much more relatable.   

Entry 1: Setting Up A Barren World

Having seen film adaptation of The Road, I had some idea of what the writing in the novel would be like.  My previous notions about the world in Cormac McCarthy's novel have rung true.  The world McCarthy creates in just the first 20 pages is staggeringly empty.  Besides the man and the boy, there is simply no life in the introductory pages of the book.  He utilizes many of what I would call depressing adjectives to describe the post-apocalyptic setting, such as "silent", "gray", and "cold".  This really drives home the message that the man and the boy are very much alone in this world.  Nothing is alive, no fish in a lake, birds in the sky, or trees on the horizon.  I have a feeling the rest of the novel will maintain the same tone set from the beginning.  I'm ready to cry many times.

The structure of the novel, while at first a bit off-putting, fits it well.  There are no chapters, simply a linear description of happenings (or rather, the lack of happenings) from third person omniscient point of view.  Each paragraph is like an entry in a diary, separated from every other paragraph.  Rarely is a paragraph longer than a page.  The result is a bunch of loosely connected descriptions of the world around the man and the boy.  At least so far, there is not a huge amount of action happening, allowing this structure to work.  The novel focuses on the world and setting, but the other big focus is on the relationship of the boy and the man.  Their dialogue is simplistic and concise. Even quotations marks are not used.  It is reminiscent of a Kafka work, because the wording is very simple but it requires analysis and represents something larger than what is originally apparent.

The first few sections of the novel provide some interesting dialogue and set up.  McCarthy's style is simple and tasteful.  Fragmented, short paragraphs help the novel flow well over what is long period of time, and the tone is established very quick.  I am ready to see what the rest of the novel will bring, as well as its differences from the film version.