The End

After finishing "The Road",  I can honestly say that I enjoyed it. I think it does a good job to show how people change when their world around them changes. The book focuses more on the changes of people, and how far they will go in order to go on living, even if there is nothing to live for. No matter how different and bad things are, people want to live. Some people just went on quietly trying to survive, but others became violent and resorted to cannibalism to live. We never realise how much we take things for granted, and then a book like this comes along and makes you think what it would be like if we had nothing.

Imagery

What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit.


This image to me seemed the most violent in the whole novel.This is an image of complete social breakdown. The weakest and most helpless-an infant- being preyed on by a group of people. This image shows us how when something catastrophic happens, all human feelings and compassion leave. There is only one thing left over, and that is the instinct and will to survive. To think that there are some people that would actually be willing to do something like this in order for food just goes to show how people can change.

Quote

"Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. " (McCarthy, 129-130)

The Man always tells The Boy stories, stories about his past, and about the world before the catastrophe that occurred. However, these stories may be too hard for the Boy to believe, because he never experience it, he grew up in the post apocalyptic world. To him the stories are just stories. The Man would then seem alien to the Boy, since he grew up in this alien world that the Boy knows nothing about. He is from a different world entirely almost.

A thought..rethought

When I first started reading this book, I thought that the man wanted nothing more than to live. He was trying so hard to keep the boy and himself alive, always searching for food, always looking for shelter. He even used up one of his precious bullets to save them, when they killed the man who wanted them to go back with him.  After a while though, when they had travelled for a really long time, and had not found any food. They were both starving, and dying slowly, and he admitted to himself that deep down he knew it would be better to just die. He knows there is not really much they will do, that life will always be like this for them, and he realises there is no point to living, they have nothing to live for.

Quotes

"He walked out in the grey light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate world. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover." (McCarthy, 110)

In this quote, the desolate world seems to be indifferent to the man. To him, the earth continues to revolve, "cold" and "relentless". I looked up the word "intestate", and it describes a person who has died and has not left a will. So the man is saying the earth died, and did not leave a will. Therefore everyone is fighting over everything and killing each other because they do not know what to do. People always need order, otherwise there is just chaos. The two hunted animals could represent the boy and the man, how they are just moving along, always scared, in this desolate world.

Quote

" I dont know what that would mean. What luck would look like. Who would know such a thing?"(McCarthy,174)

This quote happens as the old man is departing from the man and the boy. He will not wish them luck, because he does not believe in it. This may be due to the fact that in a harsh and desolate world such as this, there is no such thing as luck. When they first meet the man, he thinks them to be robbers, because maybe he has had no luck before, and been robbed and beaten. However, this quote is also quite ironic, because the old man did not believe in luck, yet he was lucky enough to meet the boy, and the man. they gave him dinner, a fire to be warm by, and even food for the road. There may be an absence of luck in this world, but if you wait long enough, it will come to you.

If I could have lunch with the author...

If I could have lunch with the author, and ask him any question, I would ask him about the setting. I would want to know where he got the idea from, whether he got it from a movie, or whether he got it from society, seeing what we are capable of doing to the world. I would also ask him what happened in the story, that the world ended up like that. When there is something concerning post apocalyptic, people almost always assume a nuclear war started it. However, it could be different. I would want to know whether it was mankinds fault what happened to the world, or if it was simply something natural that caused the world to be the way it is in the story.
If I knew what had caused the setting of the book, it would better my understanding of what each individual character went through, and what they had to see. It would help me understand their losses, and what they had to give up in order to survive. I think it would just make me enjoy the book more.

Q and A

The setting of my book is in a post apocalyptic world.

I think this is symbolic of how people can slowly destroy the world, until it ends up like the author portrays it.

I cannot believe that people actually resorted to cannibalism in order to survive.  I cannot believe that they were willing to eat a kid.

I do not trust the father when he lies to the son, because even though he is trying to protect him, it could backfire in the end.

My favourite part of the book so far is when the Man shoots the cannibal in the head, when he tries to hurt the boy.

I do not understand why the author did not explain why the world was the way it was. I would have preferred a back story at least.

If I could have lunch with the author, I would ask how he came up with the setting of the book.

Symbolism

There was something I read pretty early in the novel that I wanted to blog, but I did not get around to doing it, so I decided to go back to it. When the Man and the boy are in a supermarket, and they find a coke. They share it and both think that it is probably the last coke they will ever drink. When you read about it, it seems like some ancient piece of history that they find, kind of like someone discovering an ancient artifact from a different time. It also symbolizes how deprived the characters really are in that time. Today, we would take something like a coke for granted, because it is so readily available. For the Man and the boy however, food is scarce, and finding a coke seems like a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Quotes

"They squatted in the road and ate cold rice and cold beans that they'd cooked days ago. Already beginning to ferment."( pg 27, McCarthy).
I really liked this quote, because people today take things for granted, like food. We complain about not having anything nice to eat for lunch, or complain about what we had for dinner the night before. In The Road, these two characters are struggling for survival, eating what they can, when they can scavenge it. They eat beans and rice that has started to go off without any complaint, because it is at least edible. It takes something really big, like the world ending, or something tragic for people to actually realise what they have, and appreciate it.

"On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world." ( pg 32, McCarthy)
I think that this quote means that on the road, there are no more religious, or faithful mean. I think that by now everyone has pretty much abandoned hope that god will save them, and they have accepted the harsh realities of their world. Saying that they left, and took the world with them, could possibly infer that there was some sort of religious influence in what happened to the world. It could also mean that when the world died, so did all the religion, meaning a symbolic death, not necessarily a literary death of all religious men.

Getting Started

Last night I started to read my book. The very first thing I noticed, there was a lot of night imagery, and talk about winter. I saw the movie before I started reading, so I have a general idea of what is going on. This night and winter imagery could be foreshadowing something ominous coming. It could also signify that the world is coming to an end, it is now in its ending phase.

Another thing I noticed, that it is not like other books. When ever there is dialogue, it is not typed in quotations like in other novels. It is directly typed into the paragraphs. This is a little weird to me, as I am used to it being the other way. I am sure that I will get the hang of it, it's just a different way of reading

The Road. Why?

For our English independent study unit, I chose to read "The Road". The honest reason that I chose this book is because of the movie. I have not seen the movie though. My original choice was Fall, but then I saw Randy looking at the movie trailer for The Road. It looked really awesome, so I figured that the book must be ten times better, because the books usually are. The author of the book is Cormac McArthy, and it is 256 pages long. I read a lot, so I will probably just end up reading a little bit everyday, so as not to finish it too soon.