The End of The End

Finally, the story about the end of the world has come to an end. "Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counter-spectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence." (274) McCarthy makes it sound beautiful, the way in which everything has stopped being, the moment in which things stop becoming what they once were and the creation process reverses.

I have to say that I found the ending to be extremely sad, and naturally being a girl, I was disappointed to find that there is no hope of everything being perfect and a happily ever after. Even though it was expected that McCarthy wasn't going to fix it all at the end, I always had my hopes up that a random government would come and save all survivors and the man and the boy would live a long, complete life. The sad ending was necessary, though, because the author wanted to make the statement that messing with the Earth has consequences that cannot be reversed.

Anyway, for those who didn't know, at the end the man dies. He doesn't have the guts to take his son with him, so the boy is left alone in the middle of nowhere to mourn the death of his only companion. Luckily, (or not?) a man finds the boy, and asks him to join their "tribe." With nothing left to lose, and the promise of more kids his age, the boy decides to take the risk and trust them as good guys. The boy, as promised, talks to the dead man often and never forgets him. The reader is left hoping that the new guys are also "carrying the fire."

The last lines in McCarty's The Road confused me a little. In the last paragraph, the author wrote "...On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery." (287) I like how the ending is a lot more complex than the rest of the story, showing that the importance is the effect of the story and not the content itself.

It is saying that the world was on its way to becoming something else, starting a new road. It could never be what it was before, but there is still hope for a new world. Also, it mentions "older than man," which means that the world has been alive for a lot longer than humans have been walking in it. Even though humans were responsible for its destruction, only the human part of the world is now gone, and all that is older than humans has survived in the eyes of those who are there to witness it.

Keep Holding On

The future for the man and the boy starts to look a lot blurrier, as they realize just how alone they are and how low their stakes of surviving have become. When they find a flaregun, as this blog says, the boy is first to realize that the flaregun can't help them using its original purpose, because there is no one to ask for help to. They could throw a flare in the air, but there would be no one on the other side to see it and save them. In our current lives, most circumstances of trouble could be solved with a flaregun, or it might at least give the despaired one a little hope of being found. However, in this lonely world the man and the boy live in, signaling other humans will do no good to them.

It is interesting how the boy says that maybe God can see the flare and help them, or one of the good guys. The boy seems to be the most philosophical of them both, and certainly the one with a better heart. When the man decides to leave the poor thief naked in the middle of the road with no food or clothes, the boy is the one who brings reality back to him, and makes him go back to help. It does the thief no good; however, because when they come back in a leap of forgiveness, he is already gone.

The story continues in a very pessimistic way, as both of the main characters have their own moments of sickness. The boy gets really sick of vomit and a fever, while the man tries his best to keep him alive. But gradually, it is him who has to fight the hardest, because his cough doesn't seem to be something momentary. I think it will lead to something bigger, and cause trouble for the family. Anyway, the man had promised to not leave his son alone, so we are left wondering if in the case of his health getting worse, will he kill his son first?

How Did It Come To Be?

We are getting closer to the end of the book, and there’s still no clear explanation of what is going on that can help us understand the background on their situation. We know they live in an apocalyptic world, and the author adds little hints here and there that try to describe their surroundings, but as far as a straightforward explanation, there has been none. I have reached the point of thinking that there won’t be any in the future either, so I guess it is up to the reader to infer what the hell happened before that got them where they are now.

To reach a more educated evaluation, it is useful to take all the hints and put them together, to try to understand the image that McCarthy was trying to give us of their surroundings. I have heard that the apocalypse they are going through is supposedly an environmental apocalypse, so I’ll see how much proof I can find of that. 

The first idea that seems to be repeating itself is that the boy and the man are always out of water, in a constant worry of not finding more. Also, the houses they visit lack gas. When the man was searching the boat for anything that might be of use to them, he “turned on the stove and turned it off again,” when he realized it had no gas left. (226) The way the author wrote it made it seem as if it wasn’t important; as if the man had turned on the stove already expecting it to be empty. It shows that the man had probably done that a lot more times, and he had rarely had enough luck to find a stove with enough gas.

The main road in the story is littered all around, and the man and the boy don’t care about where they throw away their trash. The priorities in their life have been rearranged to include only that directly related to immediate survival, such as food, water, sleep, and clothing. The talk of taking care of the world for the children of tomorrow has been completely forgotten, because the survivors are those children, and tomorrow caught up to them.

Another recurring theme in the description of their surroundings is that everything around them is burned. Even though fire is what is keeping the man and the boy alive, it seems to also be the cause of their despair. When commenting on the death of a man, the boy asked “They were trying to get away weren’t they Papa? Yes. They were. Why didn’t they leave the road? They couldn’t. Everything was on fire.” (191) So we now know that fire was the cause of people’s displacement and consequently, their death. It may have been caused by a massive fire started by the lack of good care for the Earth, and global warming’s response to forest fires. 

Anyway, that is basically all we know, so we might as well classify it as one of those books that try to make us more aware of the consequences that could arise from global warming, and pose different options of what it could look like. So what is the moral of the story? Take care of the environment.

A Gray Ocean of Hope

Everything we ever thought to be the goal of the man and the boy has suddenly happened. Now what? ­­­­­­“Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and the distant sound of it… I’m sorry it’s not blue, he said. That’s okay, said the boy.” (215) The road they had been following had been leading to the ocean, and the only clear path that we had heard of as readers was getting to the beach. Now that that was taken care of, the direction to follow seems a bit blurry. Both the boy and the reader were probably disappointed to find out that the ocean is no longer blue, because it stirs in us the doubt of if in real life, the ocean will cease to be blue one day.

So the man and the boy get to the ocean, and as cold as it may be, the boy is still a boy and decides to play around and swim in it. He ends up being really cold, but still happy. The man finds a boat, and decides to search it for food or anything that could be of use. He finds can upon can of goods, some blankets, boots, and extra clothes. When he finally takes all of it back to where the boy is, they realize that it doesn’t all fit in the cart, so they decide to stay for a while near the ocean and eat as much as they can.

One day, the boy gets really sick, with a scarily high fever and vomit. The man makes him drink aspirin, as it is the only medicine they have, but the boy is sick for a few days. It scares the man a lot, and makes him wake up many times during the night to check that his son’s heart is still beating. He knows that in the situation they are in, he could die any moment. While the boy is sick, the man also has his own health problems, as he starts coughing more frequently and sometimes even wakes up the boy at night because of it. The decline in health of the two main characters is worrying, and both the man and the reader are led to evaluate the probability of them surviving in the same conditions much longer. Even though the boy eventually gets better, the doubt is ever-present.

When the man and the boy are close to resuming their journey along the road and the beach, an unexpected mishap occurs. When they come back one day, the man sees boot footprints leading to their camp, and as the worse of his fears comes true, he sees that a thief got a hold of all of their possessions, including their cart, and left. They both run out towards the road, and when they see a trace of snow on it, they run that way for as long as they can. Finally, they reach the thief, and the man threatens him with his pistol and tells him to get away from the cart. When he finally does, the man makes him take all of his clothes off, and stay naked and shoeless in the middle of the road. The boy can’t even look, as he’s terrified and begging his father to let the man put on his clothes again. They leave, but when the boy won’t talk to his father again, they go back and leave his clothes on the road under a rock.

An argument takes place between the man and the boy, as he tells his son that he’s not the one who has to worry about everything, but the boy says “Yes I am, I am the one.” (259) I think that is true, because the boy is in charge of worrying about people’s feelings. Also, the man, to make it up to him, says “I wasn’t going to kill him… and after a while the boy said: But we did kill him.” (260)

Give It Up For Cormac McCarthy

On 2008, The Oprah Show led an interview to the author of The Road, Cormac McCarthy, making it his first appearance on a television interview. It lasted about 13 minutes, in which Oprah asked McCarthy questions about him as a writer and about his book. Some of his answers were surprising and new to me, while others were expected. 

The first surprise, that answered some question about The Road, was when he told Oprah that he had a 4-year-old son when he started writing his book, and not only did McCarthy dedicate the book to his son, but he considered him his “co-writer.” McCarthy’s initial inspiration for writing The Road happened when he was standing in front of a window, and his son was staring at the city outside. Without warning, McCarthy started thinking of how that city would look like in various years, and he imagined some fires burning in the mountains. He wrote a couple of pages describing that, but only four years later did he realize that it could become a whole book.

It is important to acknowledge that the author decided to leave the names of the characters unknown, so that it could refer to any father and son in the world. It helps prove that the apocalypse could happen to anyone, no matter how perfect their lives were prior to the event. Even though the author probably wrote originally thinking about the man and the boy to be him and his son, all readers think of it as themselves and their fathers or children. 

Something else that I found unexpected from the interview was when Oprah asked Cormac McCarthy what people  should see in the book, because even though it is just about a man and a boy on a road, there are many things that can be inferred from it. Surprisingly, McCarthy answered that the reader was invited to read onto it anything they wanted, but that for him, it was only about the man and the boy. We as readers are always analyzing and over-analyzing everything we read, and even if most times it means something, there are some authors who write pretty straightforward things, meaning nothing more than what is literally said. He seemed like a simple author, writing a simple book.

McCarthy also talked about his personal life, and how he had absolutely no money until one day someone knocked at his door with a check. He said he hadn’t cared about his poverty. When asked if he believed in luck, McCarthy said that he thought there were luckier people than others in the world, but that luck wasn’t permanent, and it could leave you at any moment. 

The most important discoveries I made about the author and the book while watching the interview were that The Road meant exactly what it said, and that McCarthy had written it as a “love story” to his son. He had talked about how having a son at an old age made you appreciate him more, and I could see that he really did love his son a lot. It is always useful to see the author in real life, because it adds to the general feeling and image left after reading a book.

Hidden Epiphanies

Hidden between lines describing a purely survival-based lifestyle, lie some quotes that could be thought of as epiphanies. They could easily be looked over as normal thoughts, but they are actually very deep and life-changing.  When there is nothing more to do than to walk and think, and when everything you know can change with the blink of an eye, it is common to come up with such revealing thoughts.

When they come out of their heavenly shelter filled with food, the man and the boy find themselves immersed in an ethical battle when they encounter an old man along the road, about whether to give him food or not. They start talking with the old man, and when asked if he wishes to die, he says: "No. But I wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you." (169) When there is nothing to look forward to, the only certainty is death. I had never though about it that way, but I find it very intriguing to say that life is just a road towards death. The man and the boy have been walking along the road for a while, but the only thing that they are sure that awaits them at the end is death itself. Only when you have died you can stop worrying about it, but until then, "you've always got that ahead of you."

Something else that always captures my attention is the discussions about believing between father and son. The man always asks the boy if he understands, but when he affirms, he always questions his believability. They say: "You dont believe me. I believe you. Okay. I always believe you. I dont think so. Yes I do. I have to." (185) Having only each other, it is very important for them to believe what the other says. The boy understands that, and knows that he has to believe his father because there is nothing else for him to believe. The man doesn't think he has his son's trust, but he accepts when he says he believes him. It is a very yielding relationship, necessary to maintain the peace between them.

Another quote that I liked a lot was said by the man, in order to make sure that his son understood that he could not give up, and that it was important to be at peace with their situation if they wanted to survive. Through the man's words, McCarthy expressed "When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you." (189) It was beautiful how he said that giving up meant thinking of a brighter world and becoming happy. While they accepted the place they were in, they would keep on struggling, but the moment they started wanting something unattainable, they would be defeated.

Keep On Hoping

As the story progresses, and the man and the boy have more difficulty staying alive, their hopes of survival start wavering. The boy asks more often if they are going to die, and the father has trouble contradicting him. With the terrible cold, and the lack of food and sleep, their future looks pretty dark.

In the little sleep they got, the man would have "rich dreams which he was loathe to wake from," and he would be saddened to remember "things no longer known in the world." (131) Before, it would never have crossed their mind that they wouldn't have those things that seem natural, that they took for granted. Their life would change in the blink of an eye.

The man was full of desperation, and "the cold drove him forth to mend the fire." (131) After being outside for so long, in contact with only one other human being, it is easy to imagine that he starts to question his humanity. His priorities have become that of an animal, preceded by food, sleep, shelter, and protection from predators. It is because of this loss of human identity that he is driven to "mend the fire." Fire was discovered by men, and it hasn't been done by any other animal. By proving to himself that he can still produce fire, he becomes reassured of his humanity. We know that he has taught this to his son, as he is known to say that they are the good guys because they are carrying the fire.

Right when the man and his son are about to give up, the man finds something that saves his life. They stay in a shelter for the next couple of days, filled with cans of food and tools left by someone who didn't have a chance of facing the apocalypse. They get to rest on real beds, and eat real food. They sleep under a ceiling and with a full stomach. It is very important for McCarthy to give this kind of hope to the characters as well as the readers, because it renews everyone's energy and opens the possibility of a longer, yet successful, journey.

The man finds scissors in the midst of goods available to them, and uses them to cut the boy's and his hair. It can also be seen as a revitalization of life, and the recreation of that faith and the hope of survival. They have a new face to face the world with, and they have rekindled their spirits. Those happy days in which the man and the boy see their future brighten is my favorite part of The Road.

What Words Can Do

One of the things I like the most about The Road are its amazing descriptions. Even though the book is known for its monotonousness because of the invariability of the characters' situation, any change in location has some of the most lively descriptions ever. McCarthy makes a very good use of vocabulary, and the scenery creates itself in front of the reader's eyes along with every single detail that compiles it. When describing a house visited by the man and his son, McCarthy writes, "The plaster ceiling was bellied in great swags and the yellowed dentil molding was bowed and sprung from the upper walls. To the left through the doorway stood a large walnut buffet in what must have been the diningroom. The doors and drawers were gone but the rest of it was too large to burn." (107) I'm sure you have a very clear picture of the house on your mind right now, don't you?

What most impacts me about The Road are its amazing descriptions, but something that also caught my eye is the peculiarly different structure and form of the text. While most books have dialogue between quotations, in The Road McCarthy makes them part of the same sentence. There is also no description of who is talking, so it is up to the reader to infer who is saying what. When the man asked the boy if there was something wrong, the book says, "We'll find something to eat. We always do. The boy didnt answer. The man watched him. That's not it, is it?" (128) As you probably noticed, not only does it not specify who is talking or put quotations around the text, but also there is no apostrophe in the contraction didn't. The same happens throughout the whole book.

The lack of quotations, apostrophes, and specifications in the text might cause the reader to get confused at times, but it also allows us to appreciate the form and structure of the book and not only the content. It is as if the author wanted us to realize that in the circumstance that the boy and the man are in is so beyond grammar and societal perfection that it is not necessary to put apostrophes to words or quotations to dialogues. It also gives simplicity to the words, just like the life of the man and the boy are simple. Their lives has resorted back to animal instincts, as their primary worry in life is to eat, sleep, and get enough heat to survive. The same happens with the book: it has as much punctuation and specification for it to survive in the eyes of the reader. A very interesting form indeed.

Some Things Are Just Freaky

These next pages constitute a very hard time for the man and his son, because they have been trying to survive for many days in a very harsh and cold environment, with no food and little sleep. The boy can hardly walk much farther, and he keeps asking when they are going to die. The man is starting to lose his hope of surviving much longer, but does his best to hide the truth from his son. It is in that situation that they get to a house in the outskirts of a town, which they rack for anything they could possibly eat or use in their journey. They found some things, but nothing very useful. Meanwhile, the boy was terrified grabbing on to his father, pleading him to go out of the house. The man tries to convince his that there is no one inside, but he never expected what he would find.

The man was searching the whole house, when "he crouched and stepped down again and held out the light. Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands." (110) It is a very unexpected and freaky scene, where the reader doesn't know what to make of the fact that there are naked bodies in the house. It got worse when "they whispered, Please help us." (110) They start following the man, and other men and a woman run behind him. It accounts for a very scary scene over all, but nothing terrible happens. The man and the boy hide in a safe place.

I think that seeing these naked bodies was exceptionally scary for the man because seeing their thin and decaying bodies, he might have realized that he probably looked like that too. He didn't want to accept it, but he also needed help, and he was also dying of hunger and cold. He didn't want his son to see that, because he was trying really hard to convince him that they weren't dying, that they were going to be all right. Now that he had seen the bodies, it was hard for him to believe it. This scene also shows the reader that there are other survivors of the apocalypse, but no one will make it very far. Still, I think the man has kept his pride, because he asks his son to kill himself if he was ever about to be killed.

The Road makes the reader think about the end of the world as we know it, and of the impermanence of life. We are awakened to the lucky life we have right now, but we are also told of the possibility of it ending unpredictably at any time. A reminder of this occurs when the man was walking near an old town, and sees billboards that had been painted white, and "through the paint could be seen a pale palimpsest of advertisements for goods which no longer existed." (128) Advertisement is a very important aspect of our daily lives, as we are bombarded and affected by it every single day. The lack of advertisement describes the end of that normality, of our known materialistic world. Returning to a basic animal life, ads are no longer needed.

There are many books that try to warn people against the dangers of surrendering to society, but I have seen that The Road has been very effective in this. While a futuristic utopia might not get to us enough to change us, the idea of a very possible end of the world is always with us, and the fear of losing what we have maintains itself in the back of our heads for as long as we live. I find this book to be a very realistic yet eye-opening book about the end of life as we know it.

Let's Get Technical

The Road isn't exactly known for its difficult variety of vocabulary words, but it does have some words that bring out the meaning of the content. For example, there are no true curse words in the book, because it is all descriptions and dialogue with a child, but the author did use the word "crap," which is normally considered vulgar, to say that the animal needs of the man are the only thing he has left. (63)

Another word that is used a lot in the book is "knapsack," which is the type of bag in which they are carrying all their belongings. Basically, all they own is in their knapsack, which means they don't have much. Sometimes, when McCarthy starts up on these long descriptions about what is going on, he includes lots of words I had never heard of in one single paragraph. After so many pages with no unknown word, the appearance of many helps add to the complexity of the situation. These are some words I found that I didn't know their meaning (all were found in the same paragraph on page 63):

• emaciation:  abnormal thinness caused by lack of nutrition or by disease
• lacquered: a protective coating consisting of a resin, cellulose ester, or both
• stropping: any of several devices for sharpening razors
• collared: anything worn or placed around the neck
• grime: dirt, soot, or other filthy matter
• shears: to cut something
• rachitic: rickety, characteristic of rickets
• billcap: False word
• (source)

 It is very strange to find these many unknown words in a single descriptive paragraph, but as I said, it is very effective to emphasize the importance of a scene and to show just how different it is from the rest of the journey. It is a very good example of using words to embellish the meaning of the content. By simply reading the definitions of the unknown words I found, it is possible to infer what the paragraph means. In this case, McCarthy wants the reader to focus in his word choice.

I really like how the author defines his word choice depending on the mood of the scene he is describing, and how he repeats words when nothing has changed, and finds extravagant words to describe an unimaginable experience. He is definitely an amazing writer, as simple as he may seem.

Running Away From Memories, Yet Failing

And so the story continues, as the man and his son try to survive their lonely journey one step at a time. For a while, everything was the same, the little boy and the man walking along the road and checking how close they were from the gap. They found a river, and walked by it for some time, until they finally got to a waterfall. The man allowed his son to swim in the river pond, and he decided to dive too. It was freezing cold, but he still enjoyed feeling the beating of the water in his back. They came out shivering. Afterwards, the man found some mushrooms and they ate in front of a fire. Since the place was so good, the man was scared that there would be other people there, so even though the boy wanted to stay near the waterfall, they had to leave in the morning.

Even though some parts of the story are expected, because of the predictability of their lifestyle, some parts of the story caught me by surprise. McCarthy very cleverly discusses the lack of states in the country, by making it part of a conversation between father and son. Later along the road, they found a bridge crossing the river, which had a truck that had been "jackknifed" in it. (43) The man has to get inside to search for useful things, but it is apparent that someone has been there before. It is attached to a trailer, which surprisingly is filled with dead bodies.

They continue on, and for the first time in the story, they directly encounter another human being. It is a man who looks really bad, burned from head to toe, with almost no hair and clothes in terrible condition. The man and the son follow him, until the other man can't take it anymore and has to sit down on the road. Even though the boy cries for them to help him out, the father very sadly says that it is either them or him.

Another topic that was talked about a lot was the boy's mother. The man has a flashback, in which the lights go out in his house and his wife asks him what's wrong, and another in which the boy's birth is described. We finally know why woman is not with her husband and son, as she killed herself. "She would do it with a flake of obsidian. He'd taught her himself. Sharper than steel." (58) While thinking this, the man was probably feeling very bad about teaching her a way to kill herself. In the past, the man and the woman had had arguments about what was better, killing themselves or letting themselves be killed, but now that the man was alone with his son, he would do anything to keep them both alive. Anyway, the son had expressed his desire to kill himself to be with his mother, which greatly hurt his father.

The last thing I read was when the man woke up from his sleep and realized that a pack of men were coming towards him with rifles in their hands, and he rushed his son to wake up and they ran off together as fast as they could. We'll see what happens next.