Bc.

Martin Švanda, 189699

PhDr. Irena Přibylová, Ph.D.
A2MK_SAML Contemporary American Literature
30 October 2010

The Road
Cormac McCarthy

Topic: Vision

It is the first McCarthy´s novel that I have read and I enjoyed it more than I expected.
Though, it is not something to pick up for light entertainment. Cormac McCarthy sets this
novel in a post-apocalyptic smudgy, grey sky, in the world where the whole ground is covered
with ash, a world in which all animals, birds and plants are extinct. The only remaining is
misery, agony and starvation. The main focus of the novel is not the apocalypse that is central
to the novel, but the relationship between father and son. McCarthy uses this strongest of
relationships to ponder some important questions about humanity. The vision of world after a
global disaster is the background for the relationship of an unnamed boy and his father.
The two walk south through the dead, burned, dark America, seeking the coast, the sun
and civilisation. Although the possibility that they reach a place where life is still for living is
minimal, the two have no more possibilities. The only two things they still possess are
affection and hope. There are, of course, survivors, and that is where the real fear comes in.
Here we see the traditional transmuting of people who in utterly ultimate situation become
monstrous cannibals. I somehow doubted whether the lucky ones are those who survived or
those who had died immediately.
And it’s in the telling that McCarthy truly shines, although this is, perhaps not surprisingly,
the second aspect for which many people criticize him. McCarthy’s writing is like Guinness,
like tripe, like one of my drunken favorites: potato chip sandwiches. (Whatever, don’t knock
it unless you’ve tried it.) In other words, he’s an acquired taste. Upon first encountering him, I
needed some time to warm up to his style, but once I did, I found his prose to be both stark
and poetic, both empty and full at the same time. Those wishing to improve their own writing
would do well to study how McCarthy constructs his sentences — although I warn you that,
after awhile, his prose slowly begins to hypnotize. For anyone unfamiliar with the poetry of
his prose, I offer you the opening of The Road:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the
child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than
what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His
hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and
raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but
there was none.

The opening immediately establishes the main focus of the novel: it is not the apocalypse that
is central to the novel, but the relationship between father and son. McCarthy uses this
strongest of relationships to ponder some important questions about humanity. In a world that
kills the weak, how can a man continue to love another person, especially his son, when it is
that very love that makes him vulnerable to destruction? When all is lost, why continue to
struggle for survival? Why struggle to be human, when giving over to the animal within is not
only easier, but will most likely ensure survival? In this way, McCarthy echoes Camus, who
argues that, in the face of certain death, it is our very humanity that must compel us to
struggle for a higher good.

This message is reinforced by the ending. I won’t give it away, although I’ve read other
reviews that have; instead, I’ll simply say that McCarthy ends on a positive note. While this
scintilla of hope might seem out of place in the larger context of a work that seems entirely
bleak and hopeless, the reverse is actually true. The fact that the novel ends positively is
essential to McCarthy’s message, which is all too relevant today: there will always be love,
always something to fight for, even when there is nothing left at all.

The Road is a masterpiece by one of the finest artists working in literature, though it is not
something to pick up for light entertainment. Like most great works, it really needs no defense
from naysayers, but if I have any credibility with any of my acquaintances here, I will spend it
to recommend this novel. The Road is an important work of literature with a unique and
powerful voice that addresses fundamental human nature and one possible future for our
species if we don't get our act together. While I don't have children, McCarthy still drove
home for me the desperate juxtaposition of black despair and hopelessness with the
spontaneous altruism of parenthood and the human will to survive and shield one's children
from even the most impossible odds.
McCarthy does use unusual prose techniques and an anonymous narrative voice that takes a
bit of getting use to. These tools are hardly gimmicks, however, and did not strike me as
pretentious or affected at all. McCarthy utilizes these methods to provide a particular voice for
the protagonist -- the narrative reminded me strongly of the uninflected recitation of a
Holocaust survivor, straightforward and even objectively dull, while subjectively riveting and
horrifying.

McCarthy also uses this style to maintain some distance between the protagonist and the
reader to avoid having the book turn into an adventure yarn. For those disappointed because it
was sold to them as "post-apocalyptic," that is a fair but unfortunate criticism. I don't think
McCarthy ever intended that this be taken in the genre of World War Z or I Am Legend,
though it shares some characteristics of the latter. The Road is written much more in the genre
of Alas, Babylon, though more spare and anonymous.

For anyone who has not read this book, the odds are very good that you will find something
important in it and possibly something enlightening about yourself by your reaction to it. Be
advised, however, that "haunting" is the right word. It took me weeks to shake the dark mood
this book left me in. I'm not proud to say that I hid it from my wife after I finished it, as she's
an avid reader but tends to take these things pretty hard.

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the
child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than
what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His
hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and
raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but
there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the
child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a
fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues
where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours
and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where
lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth
from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs
of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see.
Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the
rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It
swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away
and loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and
squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month
was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south.
There’d be no surviving another winter here.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling
away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what
he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of
color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down
the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the
country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight
congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the
word of God God never spoke.

When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and
folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates
and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup. He spread the small
tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out and he took the pistol from his
belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat watching the boy sleep. He’d pulled away his
mask in the night and it was buried somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he
looked out through the trees toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen
from the road now it was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi,
Papa, he said.

I’m right here.

I know.

An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy carried
knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to abandon the cart and
make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a chrome motorcycle mirror that he
used to watch the road behind them. He shifted the pack higher on his shoulders and looked
out over the wasted country. The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray
serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you
okay? he said. The boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light,
shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.

They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a
roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should check it out, the
man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They crossed the
broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The cap was gone and the man
dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale.
He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in
place. The windows intact. The door to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing
metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that
he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A
metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in
the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden.
The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. He crossed to the desk and stood
there. Then 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.
A quarter mile down the road he stopped and looked back. We’re not thinking, he said. We
have to go back. He pushed the cart off the road and tilted it over where it could not be seen
and they left their packs and went back to the station. In the service bay he dragged out the
steel trashdrum and tipped it over and pawed out all the quart plastic oilbottles. Then they sat
in the floor decanting them of their dregs one by one, leaving the bottles to stand upside down
draining into a pan until at the end they had almost a half quart of motor oil. He screwed
down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their
little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. You can read me a story, the
boy said. Cant you, Papa? Yes, he said. I can.

On the far side of the river valley the road passed through a stark black burn. Charred and
limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the
sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened lightpoles whining thinly in the wind.
A burned house in a clearing and beyond that a reach of meadowlands stark and gray and a
raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned. Farther along were billboards
advertising motels. Everything as it once had been save faded and weathered. At the top of the
hill they stood in the cold and the wind, getting their breath. He looked at the boy. I’m all
right, the boy said. The man put his hand on his shoulder and nodded toward the open country
below them. He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain
down there where the shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched
across the waste. Nothing to see. No smoke. Can I see? the boy said. Yes. Of course you can.
The boy leaned on the cart and adjusted the wheel. What do you see? the man said. Nothing.
He lowered the glasses. It’s raining. Yes, the man said. I know.

They left the cart in a gully covered with the tarp and made their way up the slope through the
dark poles of the standing trees to where he’d seen a running ledge of rock and they sat under
the rock overhang and watched the gray sheets of rain blow across the valley. It was very
cold. They sat huddled together wrapped each in a blanket over their coats and after a while
the rain stopped and there was just the dripping in the woods.

When it had cleared they went down to the cart and pulled away the tarp and got their
blankets and the things they would need for the night. They went back up the hill and made
their camp in the dry dirt under the rocks and the man sat with his arms around the boy trying
to warm him. Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them.
The gray shape of the city vanished in the night’s onset like an apparition and he lit the little
lamp and set it back out of the wind. Then they walked out to the road and he took the boy’s
hand and they went to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out
over the darkening country to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets,
watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp. There was nothing. The lamp in the rocks on the
side of the hill was little more than a mote of light and after a while they walked back.
Everything too wet to make a fire. They ate their poor meal cold and lay down in their
bedding with the lamp between them. He’d brought the boy’s book but the boy was too tired
for reading. Can we leave the lamp on till I’m asleep? he said. Yes. Of course we can.

He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in
the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can I ask you
something? he said.
Yes. Of course.

Are we going to die?

Sometime. Not now.

And we’re still going south.

Yes.

So we’ll be warm.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay what?

Nothing. Just okay.

Go to sleep.

Okay.

I’m going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?

Yes. That’s okay.

And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?

Yes. Of course you can.

What would you do if I died?

If you died I would want to die too.

So you could be with me?

Yes. So I could be with you.

Okay.

He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The
ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried
forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring.
Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart
were stone.

He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while
the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the
trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed
for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you
there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you?
Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God.

They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the
folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned.
No sign of life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil
tracks in the dried sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He
pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever,
he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, dont you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged
landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls
it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if
anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the
lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearting, a cart of scavenged food-and
each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no
hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are
sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the
worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the
tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author

• Birth—July 20, 1933

• Where—Providence, Rhode Island, USA
• Reared—Knoxville, Tennessee
• Education—University of Tennessee
• Awards—Ingram-Merrill Award, 1959 and 1960 ; Faulkner
Prize; Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters; Guggenheim Fellowship,
1969; MacArthur Fellowship, 1981;
National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle
Award, 1992; James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 2006;
Pulitizer Prize, 2007.
• Currently—lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico

Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island. He attended the University of Tennessee in the
early 1950s, and joined the U.S. Air Force, serving four years, two of them stationed in
Alaska. McCarthy then returned to the university, where he published in the student literary
magazine and won the Ingram-Merrill Award for creative writing in 1959 and 1960.
McCarthy next went to Chicago, where he worked as an auto mechanic while writing his first
novel, The Orchard Keeper.
The Orchard Keeper was published by Random House in 1965; McCarthy's editor there was
Albert Erskine, William Faulkner's long-time editor. Before publication, McCarthy received a
traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which he used to travel
to Ireland. In 1966 he also received the Rockefeller Foundation Grant, with which he
continued to tour Europe, settling on the island of Ibiza. Here, McCarthy completed revisions
of his next novel, Outer Dark.

In 1967, McCarthy returned to the United States, moving to Tennessee. Outer Dark was
published by Random House in 1968, and McCarthy received the Guggenheim Fellowship for
Creative Writing in 1969. His next novel, Child of God, was published in 1973. From 1974 to
1975, McCarthy worked on the screenplay for a PBS film called The Gardener's Son, which
premiered in 1977. A revised version of the screenplay was later published by Ecco Press.

In the late 1970s, McCarthy moved to Texas, and in 1979 published his fourth novel, Suttree,
a book that had occupied his writing life on and off for twenty years. He received a
MacArthur Fellowship in 1981, and published his fifth novel, Blood Meridian, in 1985.

After the retirement of Albert Erskine, McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A.
Knopf. All the Pretty Horses, the first volume of The Border Trilogy, was published by Knopf
in 1992. It won both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award
and was later turned into a feature film. The Stonemason, a play that McCarthy had written in
the mid-1970s and subsequently revised, was published by Ecco Press in 1994. Soon
thereafter, Knopf released the second volume of The Border Trilogy, The Crossing; the third
volume, Cities of the Plain, was published in 1998. McCarthy's next novel, No Country for
Old Men was published in 2005. This was followed in 2006 by a novel in dramatic form, The
Sunset Limited, originally performed by Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago and
published in paperback by Vintage Books. McCarthy's most recent novel, The Road, was also
published by Knopf in 2006.

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Critics Say. . .
This is an exquisitely bleak incantation -- pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has
summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in
a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it
describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was
never meant to see.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

The Road is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy's signature,
but this time in restrained doses—short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a
few lines long…the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of
the posthumous condition of nature and civilization—"the frailty of everything revealed at
last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night."
William Kennedy - The New York Times Book Review

In Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, the bloodbath is finally complete. The violence
that animated his great Western novels has been superseded by a flash of nuclear annihilation,
which also blasts away some of what we expect from the reclusive author's work. With this
apocalyptic tale, McCarthy has moved into the allegorical realm of Samuel Beckett and José
Saramago -- and, weirdly, George Romero.
Ron Charles - The Washington Post

McCarthy's latest novel, a frightening apocalyptic vision, is narrated by a nameless man, one
of the few survivors of an unspecified civilization-ending catastrophe. He and his young son
are trekking along a treacherous highway, starving and freezing, trying to avoid roving
cannibal armies. The tale, and their lives, are saved from teetering over the edge of bleakness
thanks to the man's fierce belief that they are "the good guys" who are preserving the light of
humanity. In this stark, effective production, Stechschulte gives the father an appropriately
harsh, weary voice that sways little from its numbed register except to urge on the weakening
boy or soothe his fears after an encounter with barbarians. When they uncover some vestige
of the former world, the man recalls its vanished wonder with an aching nostalgia that makes
the listener's heart swell. Stechschulte portrays the son with a mournful, slightly breathy tone
that emphasizes the child's whininess, making him much less sympathetic than his resourceful
father. With no music or effects interrupting Stechschulte's carefully measured pace and gruff,
straightforward delivery, McCarthy's darkly poetic prose comes alive in a way that will
transfix listeners.
Publishers Weekly

Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, McCarthy
(All the Pretty Horses) here offers a prescient account of a man and his son trying to survive
in a devastated country where food is scarce and everyone has become a scavenger. The term
survival of the fittest rings true here-very few people remain, and friends are extinct.
Essentially, this is a story about nature vs. nurture, commitment and promises, and though
there aren't many characters, there is abundant life in the prose. We are reminded how
McCarthy has mastered the world outside of our domestic and social circles, with each
description reading as if he had pulled a scene from the landscape and pasted it in the book.
He uses metaphors the way some writers use punctuation, sprinkling them about with an
artist's eye, showing us that literature from the heart still exists. Recommended for all
libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/06.]-Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH Copyright 2006
Reed Business Information.
Library Journal

Even within the author's extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a
novel that demands to be read and reread. McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.)
pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the
Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy's fiction has been set
in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate
future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated
corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son
calls the father "Papa"). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally
dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened-apocalypse?
holocaust?-and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face
the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the "good
guys," carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are "bad guys,"
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. In their encounters along their
pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the
boy emerges as the novel's moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a
sweetness that represents all that's good in a universe where conventional notions of good and
evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival-through which those who wish
they'd never been born struggle to persevere-there are glimmers of comedy in an
encounterwith an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool.
Though the sentences of McCarthy's recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were,
his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry. A novel of
horrific beauty, where death is the only truth.t
Kirkus Review

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Book Club Discussion Questions

Set in the smoking ashes of a postapocalyptic America, Cormac McCarthy's The Road tells
the story of a man and his son's journey toward the sea and an uncertain salvation. The world
they pass through is a ghastly vision of scorched countryside and blasted cities "held by cores
of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of
tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the
commissaries of hell" [p. 181]. It is a starved world, all plant and animal life dead or dying,
some of the few human survivors even eating each other alive.

The father and son move through the ruins searching for food and shelter, trying to keep safe
from murderous, roving bands. They have only a pistol to defend themselves, the clothes they
are wearing, a cart of scavenged food--and each other.

Awesome in the totality of its vision, The Road is an unflinching meditation on the worst and
the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the
tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

1. Cormac McCarthy has an unmistakable prose style. What do you see as the most distinctive
features of that style? How is the writing in The Road in some ways more like poetry than
narrative prose?

2. Why do you think McCarthy has chosen not to give his characters names? How do the
generic labels of "the man" and "the boy" affect the way in which readers relate to them?

3. How is McCarthy able to make the postapocalyptic world of The Road seem so real and
utterly terrifying? Which descriptive passages are especially vivid and visceral in their
depiction of this blasted landscape? What do you find to be the most horrifying features of
this world and the survivors who inhabit it?

4. McCarthy doesn't make explicit what kind of catastrophe has ruined the earth and
destroyed human civilization, but what might be suggested by the many descriptions of a
scorched landscape covered in ash? What is implied by the father's statement that "On this
road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them
the world" [p. 32]?

5. As the father is dying, he tells his son he must go on in order to "carry the fire." When the
boy asks if the fire is real, the father says, "It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it" [p.
279]. What is this fire? Why is it so crucial that they not let it die?

6. McCarthy envisions a postapocalyptic world in which "murder was everywhere upon the
land" and the earth would soon be "largely populated by men who would eat your children in
front of your eyes" [p. 181]. How difficult or easy is it to imagine McCarthy's nightmare
vision actually happening? Do you think people would likely behave as they do in the novel,
under the same circumstances? Does it now seem that human civilization is headed toward
such an end?

7. The man and the boy think of themselves as the "good guys." In what ways are they like
and unlike the "bad guys" they encounter? What do you think McCarthy is suggesting in the
scenes in which the boy begs his father to be merciful to the strangers they encounter on the
road? How is the boy able to retain his compassion--to be, as one reviewer put it, "compassion
incarnate"?

8. The sardonic blind man named Ely who the man and boy encounter on the road tells the
father that "There is no God and we are his prophets" [p. 170]. What does he mean by this?
Why does the father say about his son, later in the same conversation, "What if I said that he's
a god?" [p. 172] Are we meant to see the son as a savior?

9. The Road takes the form of a classic journey story, a form that dates back to Homer's
Odyssey. To what destination are the man and the boy journeying? In what sense are they
"pilgrims"? What, if any, is the symbolic significance of their journey?

10. McCarthy's work often dramatizes the opposition between good and evil, with evil
sometimes emerging triumphant. What does The Road ultimately suggest about good and
evil? Which force seems to have greater power in the novel?

11. What makes the relationship between the boy and his father so powerful and poignant?
What do they feel for each other? How do they maintain their affection for and faith in each
other in such brutal conditions?

12. Why do you think McCarthy ends the novel with the image of trout in mountain streams
before the end of the world: "In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than
man and they hummed of mystery" [p. 287]. What is surprising about this ending? Does it
provide closure, or does it prompt a rethinking of all that has come before? What does it
suggest about what lies ahead?

1. From Barnes & Noble

Ask any literary critic -- and most discerning readers -- to name the greatest living American
novelist, and Cormac McCarthy is sure to surface as a major contender. Best known for his
powerful regional fiction (Sutree, the Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian, et al), this dazzling
prose stylist crafts tragic, unforgettable stories suffused with violence, alienation, and an
undeniably apocalyptic vision. Now, in what we consider McCarthy's best novel to date, the
apocalypse itself becomes a set piece. Unfolding in a terrifying future where Armageddon has
been waged and lost, The Road traces the odyssey of a father and his young son through a
desolate landscape of devastation and danger. Powerful, moving, and extraordinary by any
standard, this is McCarthy at his greatest and gravest.

2. From the Publisher

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER

National Book Critic's Circle Award Finalist

A New York Times Notable Book

One of the Best Books of the Year
The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, The Denver Post, The Kansas City Star,
Los Angeles Times, New York, People, Rocky Mountain News, Time, The Village Voice,
The Washington Post

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged
landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls
it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if
anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the
lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food-—and
each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which
no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are
sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the
worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the
tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

3. The San Francisco Chronicle

His tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living
master. It's gripping, frightning, and, ultimately, beautiful. It might very well be the best book
of the year, period.

4. The Washington Post - Ron Charles

In Cormac McCarthy's new novel, The Road, the bloodbath is finally complete. The violence
that animated his great Western novels has been superseded by a flash of nuclear annihilation,
which also blasts away some of what we expect from the reclusive author's work. With this
apocalyptic tale, McCarthy has moved into the allegorical realm of Samuel Beckett and José
Saramago -- and, weirdly, George Romero.

5. The New York Times - Janet Maslin

This is an exquisitely bleak incantation -- pure poetic brimstone. Mr. McCarthy has
summoned his fiercest visions to invoke the devastation. He gives voice to the unspeakable in
a terse cautionary tale that is too potent to be numbing, despite the stupefying ravages it
describes. Mr. McCarthy brings an almost biblical fury as he bears witness to sights man was
never meant to see.

6. Bookforum

There is an urgency to each page, and a raw emotional pull . . . making [The Road] easily one
of the most harrowing books you'll ever encounter. . . . Once opened, [it is] nearly impossible
to put down; it is as if you must keep reading in order for the characters to stay alive. . . . The
Road is a deeply imagined work and harrowing no matter what your politics.

7. The New York Times Book Review - William Kennedy

The Road is a dynamic tale, offered in the often exalted prose that is McCarthy's signature,
but this time in restrained doses—short, vivid sentences, episodes only a few paragraphs or a
few lines long…the most readable of his works, and consistently brilliant in its imagining of
the posthumous condition of nature and civilization—"the frailty of everything revealed at
last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night."

8. Chicago Tribune

A dark book that glows with the intensity of [McCarthy's] huge gift for language. . . . Why
read this? . . . Because in its lapidary transcription of the deepest despair short of total
annihilation we may ever know, this book announces the triumph of language over
nothingness.

9. Los Angeles Times

One of McCarthy's best novels, probably his most moving and perhaps his most personal.

10.Publishers Weekly

McCarthy's latest novel, a frightening apocalyptic vision, is narrated by a nameless man, one
of the few survivors of an unspecified civilization-ending catastrophe. He and his young son
are trekking along a treacherous highway, starving and freezing, trying to avoid roving
cannibal armies. The tale, and their lives, are saved from teetering over the edge of bleakness
thanks to the man's fierce belief that they are "the good guys" who are preserving the light of
humanity. In this stark, effective production, Stechschulte gives the father an appropriately
harsh, weary voice that sways little from its numbed register except to urge on the weakening
boy or soothe his fears after an encounter with barbarians. When they uncover some vestige
of the former world, the man recalls its vanished wonder with an aching nostalgia that makes
the listener's heart swell. Stechschulte portrays the son with a mournful, slightly breathy tone
that emphasizes the child's whininess, making him much less sympathetic than his resourceful
father. With no music or effects interrupting Stechschulte's carefully measured pace and gruff,
straightforward delivery, McCarthy's darkly poetic prose comes alive in a way that will
transfix listeners. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, July 24). (Oct.)
Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

11.KLIATT

To quote from the review of the audiobook in KLIATT, May 2007: The Man and the Boy are
wandering the countryside, trying to find food and simply to survive. The Boy was born a
short time after a manmade disaster, probably an atomic bomb, destroyed the world as we
know it. Years have passed and the Boy is now somewhere in mid-childhood. His mother has
long since left them, choosing death over hopelessness. He and his father trudge along the
road, pushing an old shopping cart with their meager belongings, following an old map,
avoiding "the bad guys," looking for food and heading for the coast. Their inventiveness, their
love for each other, and their sheer endurance are symbols of hope. They encounter many a
horrific situation, but always they have each other—until they don't. (Editor's note: The Road
has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, reflecting the importance of the author in modern
American literature.)

12.Library Journal

Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, McCarthy
(All the Pretty Horses) here offers a prescient account of a man and his son trying to survive
in a devastated country where food is scarce and everyone has become a scavenger. The term
survival of the fittest rings true here-very few people remain, and friends are extinct.
Essentially, this is a story about nature vs. nurture, commitment and promises, and though
there aren't many characters, there is abundant life in the prose. We are reminded how
McCarthy has mastered the world outside of our domestic and social circles, with each
description reading as if he had pulled a scene from the landscape and pasted it in the book.
He uses metaphors the way some writers use punctuation, sprinkling them about with an
artist's eye, showing us that literature from the heart still exists. Recommended for all
libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/06.]-Stephen Morrow, Columbus, OH Copyright 2006
Reed Business Information.

13.Kirkus Reviews

Even within the author's extraordinary body of work, this stands as a radical achievement, a
novel that demands to be read and reread. McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, 2005, etc.)
pushes his thematic obsessions to their extremes in a parable that reads like Night of the
Living Dead as rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Where much of McCarthy's fiction has been set
in the recent past of the South and West, here he conjures a nightmare of an indeterminate
future. A great fire has left the country covered in layers of ash and littered with incinerated
corpses. Foraging through the wasteland are a father and son, neither named (though the son
calls the father "Papa"). The father dimly remembers the world as it was and occasionally
dreams of it. The son was born on the cusp of whatever has happened-apocalypse?
holocaust?-and has never known anything else. His mother committed suicide rather than face
the unspeakable horror. As they scavenge for survival, they consider themselves the "good
guys," carriers of the fire, while most of the few remaining survivors are "bad guys,"
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. In their encounters along their
pilgrimage to the coast, where things might not be better but where they can go no further, the
boy emerges as the novel's moral conscience. The relationship between father and son has a
sweetness that represents all that's good in a universe where conventional notions of good and
evil have been extinguished. Amid the bleakness of survival-through which those who wish
they'd never been born struggle to persevere-there are glimmers of comedy in an
encounterwith an old man who plays the philosophical role of the Shakespearean fool.
Though the sentences of McCarthy's recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were,
his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry. A novel of
horrific beauty, where death is the only truth. First printing of 250,000

Posted August 19, 2009, 6:58 PM EST: This is the inaugural selection of The Eerie Coterie's
"Dark Pages" series. These selections are not classified as Horror, but fit our Coterie's theme.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is by far the best book in the last 10 years, filled with poetic
imagery and originality. Most of all, the novel incorporates what Horror is really about: the
darkest fears realized and how we overcome such horrible circumstances. The nameless father
and son could really be anyone travelling that road after the world has been marred by an
unknown cataclysm. It talks about what love truly means and how much you are willing to
sacrifice for the people you love. Would you give your life for them? Would you go as far as
you could to protect them? It also tackles the theme of living in a world long forgotten, when
you had no modern comforts and only your knowledge of survival to go on. The writing itself
is so encompassing you find yourself not just reading, but visuallizing the trauma and triumph
these characters endure. I cannot recommend a title more powerful or enjoyable from recent
years than THE ROAD. More than just a Pulitzer Prize winner, this could be considered the
best book of all time. This is #3 on the list of my favorite books of all time. Take a look at a
few others in my Top 10.

McCarthy deliberately avoids telling you exactly what happened to the world. He gives you
enough subtle clues to force you to create your own End-of-The-World scenario and by doing
so, provides your entry fee into this world. Something bad happened to the planet, that's for
sure. Hope has died a quick death, replaced with enough despair to make one weep. The
world here is covered with ash that continues to fall like the rain and snow that only punishes
the survivors. Nature has turned as ugly and unforgiving as the scavengers that roam the roads
and countryside. The man and his son, the boy, again deliberately unnamed throughout the
story, have only each other and their meager but precious belongings that they drag through
their world in backpacks and a tired shopping cart. We are privy to the flashbacks of the man,
who remembers the wife and mother only as "the woman" and was pregnant with the boy
when the world began its decay. Thus we learn that their world has been dying for years and
the survivors now live on the rare bits of its offerings; a can of soda here, some dried apples
there. They are freezing and wet always; every little fire to warm them and dry their clothing
is a pitiful thing, despite the flames that trail at the edges of the scenery like a beast forever
stalking them. Hunger is the shadow that clings to them by day; at night the cold becomes an
embrace. A perfect antithesis of Huck Finn's river, the Road here is full of death and
dangerous even to be near. Yet it is The Road that the man and boy cling to, hoping to find
their way south and avoid freezing to death even as it turns colder. There are plenty of
macabre and gruesome scenes along the way to reveal how bands of survivors have turned to
cannibalism, torture, and murder just to feed themselves. There are no animals here anymore;
Along the road, a dog's bark is as startling as a running motor. This book is god-awful in its
brilliance, full of despair and sadness. Hope is the finding of clean water or another scrap of
food on which to survive yet one more day. The man's only meaningful existence is to protect
and nurture the boy, yet he must live every day with the knowledge that he must end the boy's
life rather than see him captured by the "bad people." His love for the boy is the only real fire
that burns in this world. It is this fire that he commands the boy to carry onward. Cormac
McCarthy has offered us a glimpse at a world that will have no heroes, no brilliant plan to
save mankind, no Bruce Willis to the rescue. The man is weak at times and has his share of
flaws; you also cannot help but share his joy in the small victories and in the moments when
he gains whatever precious morsel or scrap of warmth he can for the boy. This is a world fit
only for the telling of one person's struggle to find some meaning in it. You should not travel
this road without some fire of your own.

Posted October 5, 2008, 2:35 PM EST: Starting out, I had really high expectations for this
book, and I wasn¿t disappointed. While the destination itself is meaningless, the events and
small details along the way are very revealing. For example, none of the characters are given
names, as names have no significance in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Initially, however,
none of this was apparent to me. I was almost aggravated by the dull, desperate monotony
prevalent on each page. But as the story progressed, it hit me that the dull, desperate
monotony was exactly how the man and the boy felt everyday. I can¿t recommend this book
enough, but only to some people. There are a lot of grueling, cringe-inducing scenes, and a lot
of death. If these things don¿t bother you, you owe it to yourself to read The Road.

Posted October 13, 2009, 10:35 PM EST: This novel was an exceptional read; both intimate
and horrifying. Any book that is difficult to put down automatically get's the thumbs up. It
grabbed and held my attention in the first 10 pages, something even good books fail to do in
the first 100. It is the first McCarthy novel that I have read and I enjoyed it more than I
expected. It is the ominous and somewhat perilous journey of a father and son clinging to the
hope that there is some good left in a raped and ravaged world. The story is about their
continued journey down "the road" to find some sort of salvation in what used to be the
United States but is now a cannibalistic, violent, and desperate, society of outlaws, nomads,
rapists, murderers, and thieves. At times, The Road's disturbing imagery is difficult to
stomach, although McCarthy never goes as far as it seems he will. This probably works in his
favour since at several points in the book I almost put it down because I became so afraid of
what would happen next. An author who can inject a reader emotionally like that is certainly
not lacking in his craft. A tool that McCarthy uses throughout the book to do this is false
foreshadowing; planting seeds for things the reader assumes will happen, but never do. This
adds to the suspense and fear that McCarthy creates for his audience. It also contributes to the
fear of the unknown, which is a major consideration of this story. The plot doesn't really
thicken, which adds to the simplicity and nothingness that the book is supposed to make the
reader feel. This book conveys more emotion than any other book I have ever read. McCarthy
forces the reader to experience fear, sadness, and desperation alongside the main characters.
There are a few things I didn't like. The dialogue is difficult to follow at times and can be
repetitive. Also, the use of proper names is nearly non-existent, but this seems to serve a
purpose. For example, the father and son (as well as the few other characters that come along
in the story) have descriptive terms to identify them rather than names; i.e. the man and the
boy. The few proper names that are found are mostly brand names. One example of this is
Coca Cola, when they find one last can of Coke inside a beaten vending machine in a long
abandoned and pillaged grocery store. Much of the book is description as McCarthy isn't just
telling a story of loss, but also painting a picture about what post-apocalyptic America may
look like. My interpretation of this book, aside from the message that the world is consuming
itself to the point of complete extermination, is the true terror in the unknown. It is about the
terror of being alone. It is also about the necessary attachment to god and faith when there is
nothing else left to believe in. The Road is also an interpretation of raw human nature at the
most desperate and destitute of times. The Road is definitely a new addition to some old
favourites in post-apocalyptic literature. I look forward to reading more of McCarthy's work
down the road.

Posted November 3, 2008, 7:08 PM EST: A dreary, obsolete world, survived only by cannibal
hordes and their hapless victims, would at first glance be the antithesis to a tale of a tender,
amorous relationship between father and son. But as the unnamed man and boy trek across the
barren land, the sheer love that exists between the two becomes apparent. They are "each the
other world's entire." In their hostile enviroment, they bond, strengthened by the trials of
starvation, terror, and the bleak outlook of the future. The two exemplify what every parent
and child could ever strive to be.

McCarthy's writing is both minimal and eloquent, terse and articulate. The world is described
in fractured syntax, expressing the broken thoughts that must have crossed the characters'
minds. But in the abrupt narration, simply poetic writing comes forth, making this book an
absolute joy to digest.

McCarthy also possesses the mastery of suspense. Interactions with the unlawful bands of
survivors present the terror felt by the characters is bared in raw terms to the reader. Paired
with the desolate yet intriguing imagery of the post apocalyptic world, The Road grips and
seldom lets go.

Posted October 27, 2008, 2:31 PM EST: After a horrible catastrophe takes place (possibly
nuclear), the world burns, and all that is left is its charred remains and small pockets of
survivors. A man and his son, know that it will become increasingly difficult to survive the
cold weather of the northern lands, and so they set off to head south, seeking the beach,
seeking a bit of civilization and some hope.

Left alone, with nobody to rely but each other, the two struggle to survive, walking along the
emptied highways, hiding from thieves, cannibals and marauders. Facing the harshness of
nature and of a society that has nothing left to look forward to. And in such a bleak setting,
the relationship between father and son seems that much more potent.

Elegantly written, though simply told, the story is a chilling tale that depicts men at their
greatest and their worst, and hope carried in the heart of a child that refuses to succumb to the
coldness of their life.

It is nearly impossible to make it through this book without feeling your heart strings being
pulled and without letting emotion take over. There is something about the bond between
father and son who when placed in this sort of circumstances, can keep themselves going.
There are some brutal moments which both are forced to face, and through act and dialogue
the author masterfully displays his characters and humanizes them without so much as giving
them a name. An excellent read and one that goes by surprisingly fast. If anything, I was left
wanting more¿unfortunately, the story itself does not allow it.