Rating: ★★★
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.
- Excerpt from New York Times Book Review
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is an excellent post-apocalyptic fiction novel that artfully portrayed romantic and emotional beauty of father-son relationship in the phase of darkness and debacle. The novel starts from the Appalachian Mountains where the civilization and humanity had been wiped out by unexplained catastrophe. The survived humankinds consist of cannibals and hermits searching for food. Forests, oceans, seas, and rivers are empty of life. The atmosphere is filled with ashes, resulting masks necessary item. The main characters are the father and the son; the boy’s mother had committed suicide as she was unable to overcome the disastrous world. As winter came nearby, the father, adroit traveler, suggests that the son that they should move Southeast, where climates are much warmer, along the roads. During the travel, the duos encounter numerous assaults. The father, having illness and knowing that he would die, urges to protect his son from attacks, hunger, and exposure. As the book reads, “each the other’s world entire,” the father and the son are the world to each other. They also carry a pistol with only two bullets, which the father told the son to use to kill himself before getting captured as the father knows that being captured would be more catastrophic than ever. After long and extreme adversity, the duos arrive the southeast; however, the father unable to win the illness dies. The boy, left alone, later meets a family and is invited to become a member of the family.
I am still dubious about whether I liked the book or not; yet I am certain that I wasn’t bored while reading the novel. The beginning seems a bit dull as I thought it only described the scenery, but as the story progressed, it got much more entertaining. After I finished the novel, I was disappointed by how the novel ended. I was left with a question of what is the real significance to why the wife and the husband came all of the sudden and took the son as a member of the family. Yet the book it self is well published and excellent; no wonder that the book received Pulitzer Prize. I heard the novel would be made into a film, which I am definitely going to watch. I want to compare how the movie interpreted the novel to how I’ve interpreted it. I believe there are much deeper hidden meanings of the book that I wasn’t able to recognize. If I have more leisure, I would like to read the novel once more; I would recommend the novel to people.
Reading The Road was somewhat quick and easy; the book wasn’t long in length and the fonts were also big. While I was reading the book, I noticed some particular styles that McCarthy used. First of all, absence of commas resulted in multitudes of run-on sentences. The novel also does not have typical dialogue style, by not including quotations. The dialogue style is similar to the Blindness by Jose Saramago; yet the two styles are not the same. Furthermore, there are no chapters that clearly divide the book by sections. More importantly, Cathy McCarthy’s beautiful poetic descriptions of sceneries made the literature much more eloquent. It was interesting to see that the book describes the main characters only by ‘the man’ and ‘the boy.’ More over, the main themes of the novel are the end of the world, father & son, man vs. nature, the struggle for survival, and etc.
Cormac McCarthy was born in July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island. He has written not only the novels, but also plays and screenplays. McCarthy has won four Academy Awards. Among his ten novels, The Road is his most popular novel for winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2007; another novel, No Country for Old Men, was also adopted as a film. Interestingly, McCarthy stood on The Oprah Winfrey Show, as Oprah Winfrey chose The Road as selection of her Book Club. Cormac McCarthy’s fifth novel, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, was listed third by the New York Times Magazines’ greatest American novels on 2006. McCarthy has his personal site where you an learn more interesting information about him.
The Road
Michael Park [Period 8]
