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July 11, 2011
The Road
A Desolate Future of Anguish

In “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, a father and son, who are nameless throughout the book are in a world of desolation and despair after a devastating apocalyptic event. Cormac McCarthy was the third child of two brothers and three sisters. Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy named Cormac after his father Charles but Cormac later in his young adult life changed his name to Charles to Cormac after an Irish King. Here, in this book review by Janet Maslin for The New York Times, she says “Much of its impact comes from the absolute lawlessness of its backdrop as it undermines the father’s only remaining certitude: that he must keep his boy alive no matter what danger befalls them.”. I agree here with her statement as being totally plausible if we were to live thru this kind of a cataclysm, the dire need for survival turns weak minded ruthless people into cannibals who will hunt down anyone they can to eat for their own food in this hellish burnt out desolate world. Throughout the story, your mind’s eye is all consuming with gray black horrifying sights of their world that the father and son are struggling to survive in
This novel is full of suspense, despair, terror and love for his most innocent son who has all the hope in the world for good things to happen. The novel is an easy flowing sometimes wordy book but well worth the research into the meanings of all that he puts in there. This novel pretty much moves forward in their struggle to survive in a hazardously linear direction with painfully heartwarming flashbacks of better times of a world the son does not comprehend and probably never will. I have not come across any other stories or movies that show so much human strength, compassion, honor and love as this story does in the father caring for his son in such a horrifying evil almost representative of what hell on earth would be like. In the story, the father does not give up even though he witness the slow starvation of his son and both their waning heath, “ His hand on the thin and laddered ribs, He walked out on the beach to the edge of the light and stood with his clenched fists on top of his skull an fell to his knees sobbing in rage.”, shows his desperation as a father for his son. What more torture and despair can anyone endure more than this. In the novel the father says “Keep going south. Do everything the way we did it.”(269), was the part in the novel that inspired me of his love he has for his son. Though very immensely powerful like the rest of McCarthy’s books, this one differs from the rest in only how post-apocalyptic the world is portrayed as. The dark winter of death is represented in every step they take on their struggle to keep moving, The father and son are inspiring in their completely round character based ways that make me want to be with a man like this, and have a son who’s own nature is a giving kind generous one. The father’s character is the strength of love to the death of him making sure he can give as much as he can to his son as he could when he says “ You have my whole hearth. “ (270). The strength of this man’s love for his son is inspiring. I found the writing style to be dark and ominous, with foreshadowing’s of ultimate death as strong as the winter ash before them. Here in this part of “The Road” McCarthy talks about the night “ Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one that n what had gone before.”; which reads as the foreshadowing of what is inevitable. The constant death surrounding them on their journey south is enough to bury this book deep in a chest to be forgotten if it were not for the love a father has for his