The Road - key quotes on time The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Pages 29-49;
"Ate cold beans they'd cooked days ago"-(page 29) Telescoping through time.
"Where once he'd watched trout swaying in the current"- (page 30) References to time before (flashbacks)
"Tomorrow came and went" (page 33) Telescoping through time.
"Where he stood once with his own father in a winter long ago"-(page 34) References to a time before (flashbacks).
"He woke in the morning" pg 95"It could be November" pg 93
"In the evening... tomorrow... dark of night" pg 92 - all in one paragraph
"The snow fell nor did it cease to fall" pg 101

Pg 113-133
Passage of days
‘The boy wouldn’t wake for hours’ – p124
‘He wondered if it was even midnight’ – 133‘Afternoon... evening...light draw down over the world’ – in one paragraph p131
‘He was gone longer than he’d meant to be’ – gives an indication of time flying p130
Expanded narrative time‘Lingering odour of cows... and he realized they were extinct’ – p127
‘nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good’ – p130
Abstract references
‘Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing from their sleep’ – p122
Other
‘He would have ample time later to think about that’ – shows there are no deadlines/rushing p113
Pages 155-175
'He followed the man back and forth across the lawn' (Page 155) - Time is being expanded
'While the boy slept' (Page 156) - Passage of time
'The town had been abandoned years ago' (Page 157) - References to the past.
'Impossible to tell what time of the day he was looking at' (Page 164) - Abstract reference to time
'The day was brief, hardly a day at all' (Page 164) - Telescoping through time.
Page 176-196
‘How old are you?’
Similarly to the food, the old man is unable to truthfully recall his age as there is no reason for him to know it and no reminder of the date. Time and day are hypothetical things created by humans to gain a routine in life. However, mankind is dying out and everybody lives in the moment and has no cause to plan ahead, unless people meticulously count each day then it would be impossible to tell precisely when a year has passed and even if someone did work it out, what would be the point? It’s hardly like they’re going to celebrate. McCarthy uses the old man as an example to show that in the novel, the reader can never be certain as to how much time has passed, as the characters have no idea either.
‘How long have you been on the road?’ ‘I’ve always been on the road.’
Once again, in this section, McCarthy uses the dialogue between two characters to make the reader question the necessity of time; the fact that the man can’t actually remember how long he has been on the road for suggests that time is insignificant. The way that the man says he has always been on the road would suggest that time is standing still for these people. McCarthy handles time simply by putting a halt to it to show that it is just another thing on the road which is dying.
‘People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.’
This quote is suggesting that for all the care we take over time, it doesn’t care about us. It is telling the reader that all the worry we have over keeping to a schedule is ridiculous because time is a made up thing and isn’t going to alter itself to suit us. All the people who worried and invested plans in the future, ironically, weren’t actually as prepared for the next day as they could have been where as those who take each day as it comes are surviving still as they had no expectations and don’t need time to rule their lives.
‘In the morning the stood in the road’
McCarthy gives the reader absolutely no idea what time in the morning they are talking about to once again highlight the lack of importance time holds for people on the road. All they have to go by is the road; they walk along it when it is light enough and sleep when it isn’t, to them it is completely irrelevant what time it is as they have no goals in life other than to get to the sea as quickly as possible with no real aim when they get there, meaning that they can take as long as they need to.
‘In the night he woke in the cold dark’
McCarthy uses this phrase to lead onto ‘coughing and he coughed till his chest was raw’ to fit in with the image that cold dark night quite often symbolise death, something that we know is imminent for the man but the way the author associates it with time suggests that his time is running out quickly.



Pages 197-217
'Early the day following'
'Three days. Four.'
'The following day'
'When three men stepped from behind a truck'- time expands because there is suddenly a lot more detail than the narrator usually gives; this is because it's a tense, potentially dangerous situation but also could be because it's a break from their monotonous daily lives, so every moment is taken in.

'They had not gone far'- The novel's characters use distance instead of time as a way to measure their progress, since time is now meaningless but their journey is vital to their survival.

Pages 218-238

 'They stayed in the house for four days eating and sleeping'. Time is contracted into a short paragraph.
'Long days.' Time has suddenly moved on, we cannot tell whether it is days or weeks.
'An hour later...' Chronological order.
'With dark they built a fire.' Shows the turning of day to night.
'In the morning...' Chronological order.
Page 234: Flashback, 'he remembered walking once on such a night...' he is comparing his old beach memories to his experiences on the beach now. He is remembering a better time. This is significant because flashbacks occur throughout the novel as a running theme.
Time-

Pages 260-280

 "He loaded the flarepistol and as soon as it was dark" p.262
 "...the fire had died down almost to ash and it was a black night" p.266
 "When he woke again" "Grey daylight" p.268

1) "The wintery dawn was coming" p. 266- This suggests that the months are later in the year. We depend on hints like the weather and how McCarthy describes the sceneary to establish/ estimate what time of the year it is.

2) "The earth itself contracting with the cold" p.279 This tells us that it is winter time or maybe the Earths condidtion is just becoming even worse so it is getting colder. Either suggestion could tell us that the novel has moved to the winter months of the year.

3) "What time of year?" p.279 This contradicts the hints of what time of year it is, because the man and the boy do not even know, so it is impossible to be certain what time of year it is.
Pages 302-307

'Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains' 'On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming'

'He cried for a long time'

'You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow'

The Road - review of the road

A score or more years ago, Anthony Rudolf published a pamphlet entitled "Byron's Darkness: Lost Summer and Nuclear Winter". He presented Byron's poem - written in 1816, the year the sun rose unseen, thanks to a Brobdingnagian volcanic eruption - as a prognostication of the coming catastrophe. Ignoring the current preference for global warming as the means to our end, Cormac McCarthy has now chosen to reprise Byron's vision of a world in which "the bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars/ Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air".

The three last words of his extraordinary new novel are "hummed of mystery". They refer to the world that has been lost, the world before Homo sapiens blundered on the scene. But they could equally well serve as the book's epitaph.

Numerous mysteries and their hum make The Road so much more than a political jeremiad. McCarthy declines to detail the immediate cause of the apocalypse. He is equally unspecific about the date of the catastrophe, though very certain of the time the clocks stopped: 1:17. Sounds a bit like a biblical reference to me.

Sure enough, it has occasioned much debate among McCarthy's more talmudic fans, who have noted that the protagonist of his previous book (No Country for Old Men ) was gunned down outside a motel room whose number was also 117. Significance, or mere coincidence?

Some think it a reference to Genesis 1:17 ("And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth"), while others favour the Book of Revelation: "And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead". I'm no biblical scholar, but I'll put my money on Exodus 1:17: "But the midwives feared God, and did not as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the men children alive".

In any event, The Road describes the efforts of a father to preserve his young son's life. "My job is to take care of you," the one tells the other. "I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you." Even so, the father depends upon his son, almost as much as his son depends upon him. When floored by despair and weakness he sees the boy "standing there in the road looking back at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle".

Early on their via dolorosa, the father plucks a can of Coca-Cola (perhaps the world's last) from the entrails of a smashed dispenser. The boy (who knows not what it is) sips it ceremoniously. Since hardly anything is named, the drink is not named accidentally. But to what end? Surely not product placement. No, it is because in the lost world Coca-Cola was sold as the nation's collective tea and madeleine, as the American Dream's communion wine, its bubbles a repository of youthful memory. But, to the boy, they are just fizz.
And the youthful memories he will accumulate are hellish, mediated only by a father's love. Although no political words are spoken, this quasi-religious scene is by no means apolitical.

The red can shines like a warning beacon in an otherwise grey world, a warning to those Coke-swilling horsemen of the apocalypse who anticipate the end of days and the rapture to come thereafter. Follow me, invites McCarthy, and see just what that rapture will be like.

Despite the biblical undertow, the journey that father and son undertake is unmistakably an American one: a grim re-enactment of pioneer crossings (as well as later ones by Jack Kerouac and Robert Pirsig). Instead of a covered wagon, father and son push a supermarket trolley; instead of a loyal wife and mother, there is only the memory of a woman who decamped with death; instead of dashing bandits, there are merciless cannibals who devour their own newborn, and would eat them, too, given half a chance.

As the faithless wife implies, they now inhabit the hopeless world of George A Romero, rather than the brave new one of John Ford. Yet father and son doggedly hang on to some remnant of that vanished optimism. In their minds they remain the "good guys", essentially distinct from the "bad guys". Their destination is the south, where (they hope) the freezing air may be milder.

When they eventually reach the Gulf (which turns out to be as grey and cold as everywhere else), the boy begs to be allowed to swim in it. The father's reply is worth noting. "You'll freeze your tokus off," he warns. There are plenty of obscure words in the book ("parsible", "torsional", "vermiculate") but none other of Yiddish derivation.

It's just a hunch, but I think I hear in it an echo of those heart-breaking memoirs (such as Aharon Appelfeld's) that record a feral childhood on the run from the Nazis. In short, the inhumanity of McCarthy's "bloodcults" is not unprecedented. What is different this time is that they have a made a cinder of the world, undoing the six days of creation, and making language redundant.

As the last of the good guys leads his son along the bleak southern shore, together they observe the "ashen effigies" of hydrangeas, ferns and wild orchids. When the wind has reduced them to dust, their names too will vanish from the world's diminishing store of words. Inexorably, the "sacred idiom" is being shorn of referents and so of its reality. Also gone, or going, are the "names of things one believed to be true" - not to mention the names of the main characters.

Just once the father calls out his wife's name, but we, the readers, do not get to hear it. Neither do we hear the father's name at the climactic moment when his son calls it over and over again. Nameless they remain, but some connective tissue, some deep sympathy, makes them human and knowable to us, causes us to care almost beyond bearing about their fates, and so makes us read on compulsively for fear of what might happen to them. And us.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy-424545.html

The Road - summary of the road by Cormac McCarthy

The novel begins with the man and boy in the woods, the boy asleep, as the two of them are making their journey along the road. The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world, date and place unnamed, though the reader can assume it's somewhere in what was the United States because the man tells the boy that they're walking the "state roads." Neither the man nor the boy is given a name; this anonymity adds to the novel's tone that this could be happening anywhere, to anyone. Stylistically, the writing is very fragmented and sparse from the beginning, which reflects the barren and bleak landscape through which the man and boy are traveling. McCarthy also chooses to use no quotation marks in dialogue and for some contractions, he leaves out the apostrophes. Because this is a post-apocalyptic story, the exemption of these punctuation elements might serve as a way for McCarthy to indicate that in this new world, remnants of the old world — like electricity, running water, and humanity — no longer exist, or they exist in very limited amounts.

While the boy sleeps, the man reflects upon one of his dreams of a creature with dead eyes. The man's dreams play a large role throughout the novel; the man tells both himself and the boy that good dreams are to be feared because they indicate a form of acceptance, and that death would inevitably be near. Bad dreams, on the other hand, are reassuring because they demonstrate that the man and boy are still persevering in the world they inhabit.

From the start, it's clear that the boy is all the man worries about. He is all the man has, and the man believes that he's been entrusted by God to protect the boy. He keeps a pistol with him at all times, unless he goes inside a house. Then he gives the pistol to the boy. The pistol, though, only has two bullets.

The man, too, is all the boy has. When the boy wakes, they set out on the road yet again, making their way through a "nuclear winter" that follows them from start to finish as they make their way south to the coast, hoping to find a better life there, although the man knows there's no reason for him to hope that things will be different for them there. They have a grocery cart with them, filled with their belongings and supplies for their journey. They are running low on food, and the man is fighting a bad cough, one that sprays blood on the gray snow.

They come upon towns and cities that are mere shells of what they once were. Remnants of the old world often — like houses, billboards, and hotels — clash with the reality of the new world, reminding the man of the life he once lived. The man remembers an evening spent on the lake with his uncle. And he remembers his wife — who left him and the boy, presumably to kill herself and escape this horrible new world.

In one grocery store, the man finds a pop machine that has a single Coca-Cola in it. He retrieves it for the boy and lets him drink it. The man likes to offer whatever he can to his son to make his world a bit more pleasant and to give him glimpses into the world that existed before him.

The man and boy come upon the house where the man grew up. The boy is scared of this house, as he is of many of the houses. The boy worries they'll run into someone, like the roadagents or bad guys who eat people in order to survive. The man has decided, too, that should roadagents find them, that he will kill the boy so that they cannot torture him, but he often wonders to himself if he would be able to do it if the time should ever come.

They come upon a waterfall and the man and boy swim together, the man teaching the boy how to float. It's a tender moment that suggests lessons that fathers would have taught their sons in the old world. Throughout the novel there are moments like this one at the waterfall, scenes that prove the bond between fathers and sons still exist in this new world. It exists, in many ways, just as it did before. The father cares for his son, and teaches his son, and worries about his son's future under such uncertain circumstances.

The boy is very concerned with making sure they are "carrying the fire," assuring himself that he and his father are the good guys as opposed to the bad guys (who eat dogs and other people). The man tells the boy stories of justice and courage from the old world in the hopes that such stories will keep the fire alive in the boy. The man hopes for a future that might again also harbor courage, justice, and humanity.

As they walk, they keep track of their location on a worn and tattered map that they must piece together like a puzzle each time they use it. While on the road, they come upon a man who's been struck by lightning. They pass the burnt man and the boy wants to help him, but his father says they've got nothing to give him. The boy cries for the man, showing his kind heart and his compassionate nature in a world where very little humanity exists.

The man has flashbacks about leaving his billfold behind earlier in the journey, after his wife left him and the boy. He recalls that he also left behind his only picture of his wife, and ponders whether he could have convinced her to stay alive with them. The man remembers the night that his son was born, after the clocks all stopped, how he'd delivered the baby himself, marking the beginning of their intense father/son bond.

A truck full of roadagents comes upon the man and the boy, who hide in the woods. The truck breaks down and one of the bad men finds them in the woods. The bad man grabs the boy, and the boy's father shoots the man in the head and both escape into the woods. Now the pistol has only one bullet left, and the man knows that this bullet is for his son should the time come. The boy wants to know if they are still the good guys, despite his father's committing a murder. His father assures him that they are.

The man views his son as a holy object, something sacred. The boy is a source of light for the man and the man believes that if there is any proof of God, the boy is it.

The man and boy are cold and starving, as they are for most of the novel. As they travel, they are on a constant lookout for food, clothing, shoes, supplies, and roadagents. In one town, the boy thinks he sees a dog and a little boy and tries to chase after them. He worries about the other little boy for the rest of the novel.

By the time they come upon a once grand house, the boy and man are starving. There are suspicious items in the house, such as piles of blankets and clothes and shoes and a bell attached to a string, but the man these. He finds a door in the floor of a pantry, and breaks the lock. The boy becomes frightened and repeatedly asks if they can leave. In the basement, the man and boy find naked people who are being kept alive for others to eat. The man and boy flee just as the roadagents return. They hide in the woods through the freezing night, the man feeling certain that this is the day when he's going to have to kill his son. But they survive the night and go undiscovered.

They continue their journey, exhausted and still starving. The man leaves the boy to sleep while he explores, and he finds an old apple orchard with some dried out apples. He continues to the house that's adjacent to the orchard, where he finds a tank of water. The man fills some jars with water, gathers the dried apples, and takes them back to the boy. The man also found a dried drink mix, grape flavored, which he gives the boy. The boy enjoys the drink and their spirits are lifted for a moment.

The man and boy move on, but the perceptive boy asks his father about the people they found in the basement. The boy knows that the people are going to be eaten and understands that he and his father couldn't help them because then they may have been eaten, too. The boy asks if they would ever eat anyone, and his father assures him that they wouldn't. They are the good guys.

They press on, enduring more cold, rain, and hunger. Nearing death, the man's dreams turned to happy thoughts of his wife. They come upon another house, and the man feels something strange under his feet as he walks from the house to the shed. He digs and finds a plywood door in the ground. The boy is terrified and begs his father not to open it. After some time, the man tells the boy that the good guys keep trying, so they have to open the door and find out what's down there. What they discover is a bunker, full of supplies and canned food, cots to sleep on, water, and a chemical toilet. It is a brief sanctuary from the world above. The man realizes that he'd been ready to die, but they would live. This is hard for the man to accept. The man and boy stay in the bunker for days, eating and sleeping. The boy wishes he could thank the people who left these things. He's sorry that they're dead, but hopes they're safe in heaven.

The man whittles fake bullets from a tree branch and puts them in the pistol with the one true bullet. He wants the gun to appear loaded should they encounter others on the road. They go into town to find a new cart and return to their bunker to load up with supplies. In the house, the man shaves and cuts both his own hair and the boy's — another moment in the novel that recalls a father/son ritual of the old world. They plan to leave the next day, but the following morning they wake up and see rain, so they eat and sleep some more to restore their strength. Then, they set out on the road again, still heading south.

They come upon another traveler on the road, an old man who tells them his name is Ely, which is not true. Ely is surprised by seeing the boy, having convinced himself that he never thought he'd see a child again. The boy persuades his father to let Ely eat dinner with them that night. The man agrees, but tells his son that Ely can't stay with them for long. Later that night, the man and Ely talk about the old world, about death, God, and the future — particularly, about what it would be like to be the last human on the planet. The next day as they prepare to part ways, the boy gives Ely some food to take with him. His father reluctantly gives away their supplies. As Ely moved on, the boy is upset because he knows that Ely is going to die.

As they continue moving south, the man and boy run into other towns and landscapes that act as skeletons of the old world, both literally and metaphorically. They see bones of creatures and humans alike, as well as empty houses, barns, and vehicles. They find a train in the woods, and the man shows the boy how to play conductor.

The boy asks his father about the sea. He wants to know if it's blue. The man says it used to be. The man has a fever, which causes the two to camp in the woods for over four days. The boy is afraid his father is going to die, and the man's dreams turn to dead relatives and better times in his life. The boy's dreams continue to be bad, and the man encourages him, saying that his bad dreams mean he hasn't given up. The man says he won't let his son give up.

When they set out again, the man is even weaker than before. They come upon numerous burned bodies and melted roads that have reset in warped shapes. There are people following them: three men and a pregnant woman. The man and boy hide and let the group pass. Later, the man and boy come upon their camp and discover the baby skewered over a fire. The boy doesn't speak for over a day. Then, he asks about the baby; he doesn't understand where it came from.

Their arrival at the coast is anti-climactic. The water looks gray and the boy is disappointed. It looks as if, even at the southern coast, life isn't sustainable. But the boy, with his father's encouragement, runs to the waves and swims in the ocean, which lifts both his and his father's spirits.

From the shore, the man and boy see a boat in the water. The man swam to the boat and explores it, finding supplies, including some food, a first-aid kit, and a flare gun. He and the boy make their camp close to the beach, plundering the ship each day to see what else they can find. The man's cough worsens and then the boy gets sick, too. The man believes the boy will die and he is terrified and enraged. The boy, though, recovers.

The man and boy decide to leave their camp on the beach, and they pare down their food stores so that the cart is more manageable. They hike up and down the shore, and when they return to their camp they see that all of their belongings have been stolen. They take off after the thief and find him. The man makes the thief take off all of his clothes, leaving him there for dead, which is what the man tells the boy the thief did to them. The boy begs his father not to hurt the man, and when they leave the boy cries and convinces his father to take the man's clothes back to him. They can't find the man, but leave his clothes in the road. The boy tell the man that they're responsible for that other man, that they killed him, and it makes the boy question their role as the good guys. He says they should be helping people.

They walk through another barren town, and the man gets shot in the leg by an arrow. He shoots a flare through the window from which the arrow came and hits the man who shot him. It's unclear whether he kills the man, but when the boy asks, his father tells him that the arrow shooter lived.

The man stitches up his leg and they press on. The man grows weaker, his cough worsening and becoming even bloodier than before. The man's dreams soften and he knows he's going to die. They make camp and the man tells the boy not to cover him because he wants to see the sky. The boy brings his father water, and the man sees a light surrounding the boy. The man tells the boy to go on, to leave him, but the boy refuses. Eventually, the man dies. The boy stays with his father's body for three days, then a man with a shotgun finds him. The man invites the boy to come along with them. The man says that he's one of the good guys and that he's carrying the fire, too. He also says that they've got a little boy with them and a little girl, too. Eventually, the boy decides to go, but not before he says goodbye to his father. The boy leaves his father covered in a blanket.

The novel ends with the boy welcomed into a new family in this new world that he must learn to inhabit. The question of his future, and the future of humanity remains. The boy talks with the woman about God, and he admits to the woman that it's easier for him to talk to his father instead of to God. The woman tells the boy this is okay, because God's breath passes through all men. The final passage of the novel is set up in story form, evoking thoughts not only of the man and boy's story, but also of humanity's story as a whole. The novel ends with a note of mystery — the mystery of the bond that exists between father and son; the mystery of the boy's and humanity's future; and the mystery of this new world and what it will be like now that it has been forever changed.

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/literature/the-road/book-summary.html

The Road - voice and point of veiw

The Road is written in the third person, in the voice of an omniscient narrator, with the characters referred to as ‘he’ or ‘the boy’. However, within this, McCarthy manipulates and plays with the narrative voice and the point of view from which the story is seen. Here are some of the things you might find interesting to explore in relation to the narrative voice of The Road:

• –  3rd person voice, omniscient point of view
• –  3rd person voice, from the point of view of the man
• –  3rd person voice, from the point of view of the boy
• –  unattributed dialogue (i.e. without ‘he said’)
• –  decontextualised dialogue (without commentary from the narrator)
• –  unattributed thoughts (i.e. without ‘he thought’)
• –  not signalling where the narrative ends and dialogue or the thoughts of a character in the first person begin
• –  dream sequences related without a clear sense of whether it is in the third or first person
• –  3rd person free indirect style where the reader not only feels he/she is seeing events from a character’s perspective but that it is in the character’s own words, not those of the narrative voice.

P.120 "they lay listening ... quickly."

-promotes confusion and dissorientation with the quick changing between omniscient narrator, naration from the mans point of veiw and then the commandments of an unknown narrator who could be either the man commanding himself, the omniscient narrator or the wife commanding him. Because of this it follows the last of the points.

The Road - 21 mark essay question on the road (30 mins)

How do you respond to the view that the story in The Road is weakened because so much of the characters’ history is untold?

Cormac McCarthy does not weaken the narrative in the road by revealing little of the past of the characters, the road in fact being thrown almost fully into mystery as the characters are unknown and yet stalked throughout the novel by the reader. McCarthy decreases the level of emotion and empathy between the reader and the two characters of the “boy” and the “man” by giving them no names, this is perhaps the biggest part of the characters being in the mind of the reader, the part to which tells you who speaks and also who is being referred to as the lack of name gives little to no direction as to who the speech is directed to, are they speech to each other “Yes. Like us.” Where the speech is clearly defined to the two of them or are they speaking directly to the reader “Are we still the good guys?” with no reference from one to the other. The memories shown are also extended beyond the length of time that the same actions would take in the current time so as to make their importance known to the reader, this shows that an amount of history to the characters which is needed to be known is understood by the reader.

The history that is explained is sporadic and has little linear quality. For example the death of the woman, and the memory associated with it are placed before the birth of their son, who is able to speak in the previous memory “She’s gone isn’t she”, this promotes confusion of the reader and makes the character of the father show which memories are more important to him, that the death of his wife is more important to him than the birth of his first and only son. The routine of these memories are that of either large quantities of description e.g. “Gold scrollwork and scones and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage”, action e.g. “She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian.” Or speech e.g. “You have no argument because there is none. Will you tell him goodbye? No. I will not”. These memories can focus on one aspect or a small amount of two but in none of the memories shown is there ever a blend of all three.

The language used in the memories which strengthen the story of the road are filled with questioning and confusion, as though the man’s mind is mixing the true memories with his current thoughts and moods, “What am I to tell him?” commanding the memory as he wonders this in the time at which he is set.  When describing the memories to his son, the fathers words are laced with regret and longing for the past constantly being reminded of the things which happened in his past, when talking to his father the son asks if he had any friends and if he remembered them to which the father responds “Yes. I remember them … They died”

The past is widely explored in the novel and the statement is incorrect, not only are the relevant memories for the story of the apocalypse there to make sense of what happened to the world but they contain the character of the wife who impacts the man drastically, but it’s not just the memories which explain the past but the conversations between man and boy which take place and the locations to which the boy is taken and shown.

 

The Road - Character profiles - Ely

This character is not called Ely. Ely is mearly the name that he makes up for the man. as he is leaving the two characters of the man and the boy he admits that Ely is not his real name.

the road is a book full of nameless characters so this character who appears out of nowhere with a name, must be important or have some meaning. His name is a misspelled version of the biblical prophet Eli. He shares many of the same aspects of he prohet with him being old and doddery with a stick. His speech is varied and makes littel sence even when a drect question is given to him. he fits in with McCarthys revelation style novel, although Eli preaches the opposite to that which you would expect a prophet to preach, for example he says "there is no god" which identifies him as more of an anti prophet, one who preaches the end and lack of entity.

Eli also is the one person with whom we idetify the boys kindness, as although Eli is not even thankful of the food or help, the boy still laveshes him with as much of hose as he can, showing the boy to mybe be closer to god than the elderly man Eli.  

The Road - pictures reminicent of the road

The Road - symbols and metaphors

Water, cleaning and washing
- cleanliness, washing away the worlds horrors, water could link to the boy being baptizied, drowning,
takes place a few times and these are when the father cleans the boy, the last time is in the bunker as this is the last time that they are safe.
The sea
- hope, saftey, food, water, blue, grey, dead fish,
throughout the book the sea is the place where man and boy are trying to get to when they get there they are dissapointed as the sea is just like everything else in the world.
The colour grey
 - surroundings, everything, mirrors the value of people in the world
everything is grey other than the fathers memorys e.g. the memory of him and his wife in the theatre as the place is described as golden.

 Ash
 - constant, covers everything, reminder of deathcould be the ash of people for all things when burnt turn to ash, giving the lives of the boy and man trudging through human ash a bit more of an omnious feel.

Fire
- heat, burn, destruction, death, hope, spirit,
the two characters "carry the fire" but that is never truly defined as to what it is, could it be hope, strength, being a good guy? or could it really be something more sinister, like a weapon or chip embeded in them which could cause more distruction?
Sight/sightlessness
- the future,
 looking over the see there is nothing to be seen other than skeletons on the beach and a crashed boat, when the father shoots a flare into the sky they can see nothing, this is the point where the two realise there is no help, no sympathy in the world other than theirs.

Seeds
- rebirth, food, hope
the seeds being eaten by the man and boy are symbolic of nations taking things before they are ready, that things are not given time to establish and so are destroyed. they could also symbolise the fact that potential is still in the earth to reawaken from this death or sleep.
Music/musical instruments
- showing that there is still some beauty in the world, the father makes the boy an instument which he later throws away, music is shown to be the same as inocence, the boy becomes an adult thus losing that inocence and nolonger needing the music


Animal imagery
- imaginary
skeltons are found but nowhere in the book are there animals shown, they could either all be dead or in some other far off country, the boy however constantly wonders where any animals are.

Religious imagery
- hope for the father and son, anti-prophet Ely,
the boy calls himself "the one" and his father asks Ely if he would believe that his son was a god.
The Coca Cola can
- how things used to be, the sweet in a sour world
a very important symbol of american culture, a symbol of national unity in the second world war and the spirit of america in the present times.

The Road - full review of the road

Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy's other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America.

We can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes. The Tough Guy tradition comes up from Fenimore Cooper, with a touch of Poe, through Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway. The Savant tradition comes from Hawthorne, especially through Henry James, Edith Wharton and Scott Fitzgerald. You could argue that the latter is liberal, east coast/New York, while the Tough Guys are gothic, reactionary, nihilistic, openly religious, southern or fundamentally rural.
The Savants' blood line (curiously unrepresentative of Americans generally) has gained undoubted ascendancy in the literary firmament of the US. Upper middle class, urban and cosmopolitan, they or their own species review themselves. The current Tough Guys are a murder of great, hopelessly masculine, undomesticated writers, whose critical reputations have been and still are today cruelly divergent, adrift and largely unrewarded compared to the contemporary Savant school. In literature as in American life, success must be total and contrasted "failure" fatally dispiriting.

But in both content and technical riches, the Tough Guys are the true legislators of tortured American souls. They could include novelists Thomas McGuane, William Gaddis, Barry Hannah, Leon Rooke, Harry Crews, Jim Harrison, Mark Richard, James Welch and Denis Johnson. Cormac McCarthy is granddaddy to them all. New York critics may prefer their perfidy to be ignored, comforting themselves with the superlatives for All the Pretty Horses, but we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. Now he has given us his great American nightmare.

The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, "each other's world entire". The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering.

America - and presumably the world - has suffered an apocalypse the nature of which is unclear and, faced with such loss, irrelevant. The centre of the world is sickened. Earthquakes shunt, fire storms smear a "cauterised terrain", the ash-filled air requires slipshod veils to cover the mouth. Nature revolts. The ruined world is long plundered, with canned food and good shoes the ultimate aspiration. Almost all have plunged into complete Conradian savagery: murdering convoys of road agents, marauders and "bloodcults" plunder these wastes. Most have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: "Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances ... and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each." Despite this soul desert, the end of God and ethics, the father still defines and endangers himself by trying to instil moral values in his son, by refusing to abandon all belief.

All of this is utterly convincing and physically chilling. The father is coughing blood, which forces him and his son, "in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep", on to the treacherous road southward, towards a sea and - possibly - survivable, milder winters. They push their salvage in a shopping cart, wryly fitted with a motorcycle mirror to keep sentinel over that road behind. The father has a pistol, with two bullets only. He faces the nadir of human and parental existence; his wife, the boy's mother, has already committed suicide. If caught, the multifarious reavers will obviously rape his son, then slaughter and eat them both. He plans to shoot his son - though he questions his ability to do so - if they are caught. Occasionally, between nightmares, the father seeks refuge in dangerously needy and exquisite recollections of our lost world.

They move south through nuclear grey winter, "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world", sleeping badly beneath filthy tarpaulin, setting hidden campfires, exploring ruined houses, scavenging shrivelled apples. We feel and pity their starving dereliction as, despite the profound challenge to the imaginative contemporary novelist, McCarthy completely achieves this physical and metaphysical hell for us. "The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true."

Such a scenario allows McCarthy finally to foreground only the very basics of physical human survival and the intimate evocation of a destroyed landscape drawn with such precision and beauty. He makes us ache with nostalgia for restored normality. The Road also encapsulates the usual cold violence, the biblical tincture of male masochism, of wounds and rites of passage. His central character can adopt a universal belligerence and misanthropy. In this damnation, rightly so, everyone, finally, is the enemy. He tells his son: "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed by God to do that ... We are the good guys." The other uncomfortable, tellingly national moment comes when the father salvages perhaps the last can of Coke in the world. This is truly an American apocalypse.

The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy's late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description. As has been said before, McCarthy is worthy of his biblical themes, and with some deeply nuanced paragraphs retriggering verbs and nouns that are surprising and delightful to the ear, Shakespeare is evoked. The way McCarthy sails close to the prose of late Beckett is also remarkable; the novel proceeds in Beckett-like, varied paragraphs. They are unlikely relatives, these two artists in old age, cornered by bleak experience and the rich limits of an English pulverised down through despair to a pleasingly wry perfection. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms out-held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle."

Set piece after set piece, you will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised with disgust and the fascinating novelty of it all: breathtakingly lucky escapes; a complete train, abandoned and alone on an embankment; a sudden liberating, joyous discovery or a cellar of incarcerated amputees being slowly eaten. And everywhere the mummified dead, "shrivelled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth".

All the modern novel can do is done here. After the great historical fictions of the American west, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy, The Road is no artistic pinnacle for McCarthy but instead a masterly reclamation of those midnight-black, gothic worlds of Outer Dark (1968) and the similarly terrifying but beautiful Child of God (1973). How will this vital novel be positioned in today's America by Savants, Tough Guys or worse? Could its nightmare vistas reinforce those in the US who are determined to manipulate its people into believing that terror came into being only in 2001? This text, in its fragility, exists uneasily within such ill times. It's perverse that the scorched earth which The Road depicts often brings to mind those real apocalypses of southern Iraq beneath black oil smoke, or New Orleans - vistas not unconnected with the contemporary American regime.

One night, when the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, he weeps, not about the obvious but about beauty and goodness, "things he'd no longer any way to think about". Camus wrote that the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely. The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose. It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4

The Road - quotes and relevence to the woman 1

P.17 "From daydreams on the road there was no waking ... freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned."

Representation:
-Sanity.
-What the man wants.
-The mans life before.
-The mans ove for his wife.
-Memorys of his wifes body and feeling.
-Forgeting her slowly.
-Wealth as they were at the theater.

Thematic:
-Memory.
-Regret.
-Hate (of the man towards himself) .
-Dreams.
-Art.
-Wealth.
-Love.
-Sadness.
-Loss.
-Past.

Symbolic:
-Sex through the womans actions, showing her to be more dominant in this area.
-Love through how close they are.
-Maddness with the man walking through his daydream.
-The wealh shown in the memory mirrors the value of the memory to him.
-Death as he tells either the memory or reader to be damned.

Structural:
-short sentences when coming back to reality from th daydream.

The Road - reasons for why there are so few refrences to women

-The man wans to forget his wife.
-They are unimportant to the daily life of the man and the boy.
-Women symbolize life and reproduction, there is no more life in the world and no new life.
-The wife could not kill the boy, so she had no reason to be in the narrative.
-The mother is dead.
-The relationship between the father and son is more established.
-Mother earth is changed in the book to the dead earth. women equal death.
-The boy would not be so nieve if the woman had been alive.
-The mother was resourceful as she knew they would all die, the story of the man ad boy is about stalling this.

The Road - screenplay for opening to episode 1

-- (the man and the wife are sat together looking younger in a golden theater, the woman then moves the mans hand into her lap, turns her head towards the man and smiles)

-switch scene

--(man wakes up breathing hard, looks over to the boy and hecks to see if he is breathing, when the man finds that he is, he then starts to reath a a more normal rate.)

-fade out

--(man is standing with binoculars.)

-switch to mans view

---(camera surveys a bleak grey city landscape)

Man: No smoke. Nothing to see.
Boy: Can I see?
Man: Yes. Ofcourse you can.

--(Boy looks through binoculars, adjusts the wheel)

Man: What do you see?
Boy: Nothing.

--(Boy lowers the binoculars)

Boy: It's raining.
Man: Yes. I know.

-fade out

--(the womans face turning to smile at the camera as though from the mans perspective in the previous dream)

The Road - 3 part episodes

Episode 1 - a dream sequence of theman and woman in a golden theater, introduction of man and boy the flash backs to the woman between episodes of consiquence between man and boy. ends with wallet being placed in the road with the picture of his wife upon it.

Episode 2 - roadrat is killed, the encounter with the lightning struck man and the man and boy walking into the cellar full of half eaten people. ends with man and boy running away from the house into the field.

Episode 3 - opens with man and boy asleep in field, walk to beach, food from boat and cart eing stolen then being found, man shot by arrow, they walk on and then the man dies and the boy walks of with new fmilly.

The Road - reveiws of the road

Add another to Cormac McCarthy’s growing list of masterpieces. McCarthy’s new novel, The Road, combines Blood Meridian’s terse, poetic meditations on the horrific depths of human depravity with the taut, thriller writing found in his most recent work, No Country for Old Men. What separates The Road from his other works is McCarthy’s ability to capture moments of lyrical and emotional beauty in a father and son’s haunted relationship even as a silent cloud of death covers the world in darkness.

Pros

• Sears its mark into your mind from the first sentence to weeks after you’ve put it down.
• Reveals the strength of a father’s love for his son in the bleakest of circumstances.
• Written by a master author who knows how to make every word count.
• Involves a post-apocalyptic world that is frighteningly realized.

Cons

• Only recommended for aged and bold readers

mike sulivan  -  http://bestsellers.about.com/od/fictionreviews/gr/road_mccarthy.htm

The Road is a tale of a father and his son, set in a post-apocalyptic world (“barren, silent, godless”). The weather is harsh, and humans and other living forms have become rare. Both are on the road, moving towards south where they are hoping to have a better chance of survival. They move through deserted houses, scouring for food, fighting the bitter cold and snow, and hiding from other survivors who could be looters or cannibals. Both father’s and son’s physical condition are deteriorating.
The father is protective and is almost apologetic for bringing the son into this terrifying world. He is willing to be ruthless and take more risks to survive, unlike his son. The son is, on the other hand, more compassionate. He represents the goodness that believes in helping others. We can understand this in the event where the son sees a little child and wants to help him. But his father insists that they continue moving. In another event, a thief runs away with their belongings. The father catches the thief and wants to be punish him but the son pleads with the father not to be cruel.
While reading this novel, we can sense the tenderness and love that the father has for his son, and we also experience the child’s innocence and love for his father. Indeed, something beautiful can exist on the canvas of a terrible world.
McCarthy’s style of writing is about imagery, whether he is describing the beach: “at the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore… Senseless. Senseless.” Or whether he is describing the boy: “The boy’s candlecolored skin was all but translucent. With his great staring eyes he’d the look of an alien”.
His style is also detail-oriented, making the setting plausible. For instance, the man and his son find an unoccupied bunker. McCarthy gives a detailed description of the bunker, describing the iron cots, the wall, the floor, crates of canned food, the lantern, and the utensils.
The two characters – the father and his son - are nameless throughout the novel. We read on because we want to know what happens to these two. Will they both survive? Where will they end up? Or perhaps another reason we keep turning the pages is the curiosity to know more about this distraught world that McCarthy has created with so much detail.
If nothing else, the book makes us appreciate what we have in our present life and probably also warns us not to tinker with forces that can create havoc.
http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-the-road-by-cormac3/

The Road - symbolism in the novel

The road or journey has often been used as a metaphor for life itself – the journey from birth to death.
- the road is a journey which does beging with life andends with death but it is not the lie story of a single character, it is the story of what a man and boy do, where they are going and how they get there, with the boy begin bor around a quater of the way into the novel during the fathers recolection moments whilst the father dies at the end of the story, so yes the road is a novel which semi begins with life and ends with death but it also starts with death, there is death at the same time the son is born, then the rest of the book contain death untill the end where there is more death but this time of the fther and o there is only the life which survived to keep on going.

5+5=1

Women in the novel are seen as stronger through suicide.
The temptation of death.
A constant reminder of the struggle to survive.
Women are symbols of life.
Women are as bad if not worse than men in th novel
+
Suicide
Temptation
Survive
Symbols
Women
=
Temptation

the role of the mother in the novel seems to be more of a reminder to the man of how easy it is to give up on the world and to take the easy way out, she is the temptation of death for the man.

The Road - episodes and the context in which the woman is mentioned part 2

P.54 "The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a serise of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the light switchbut the power was already gone. A dull rose glowin the widow-glass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was sanding in the doorway in her nightwear clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening?"

Representation:
-Prepartion as the man knew somehow tha this was what he would have to do if this event occured.
-Pregnancy as the woman is shown to be far into her pregnancy as she has to hold her belly in one hand.
-Conspiracy as the man does not seem suprised and appears to know exactly what he needs to do.
-Death as the explosions in the distance could have people within them.

Thematic:
-Death is a major theme throughout the book this is the reason shown to be the start of the ongoing death march of the man and of the boy.
-Preparation as the man begins to prepare with the water so that the two of thm will have enough to drink in the coming apocolypse and not die as quickly as others.
-Life in death as this is the begining of the dead world and the woman is pregnant with the new life in the newly deceased world.
-Past and of memory as this event happend years preiously to the man and boys journey to the ocean.

Symbolic:
-Pregnancy of the life within.
-Explosions, the world is coming to an end, everything is dieing.
-Death.

Structural:
-Speech with out speech marks.
-No real emotion at the end of the world is shown. 

The Road - episodes and the context in which the woman is mentioned part 1

P.17 "From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in the theater with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your col and be damned."

Representation:
-The sanity of the man, walking along dreaming of what he had once had, years after it was taken from him.
-What he wants, the man wants to be with her but his mind is drawn to her more sexual acts like her holding his hand n her lap.
-His love for her, or could it be more is obsession with her, to still be seeing her in his minds eye years after she had gone to her new love, death.
-Memorys of her, her body, her feeling, but not her scent.
-Forgetting her slowly, forgetting her scent.
-Wealth as they were in a theater listening to music being played to them whilst surrounded by gold.

Themeatic:
-Sex.
-Memory.
-Regret.
-Hate(of himself for remembering this).
-Dreams.
-Art.
-Wealth.
-Love.
-Saddness.
-Loss.
-Past.

Symbolic:
-Sex through the womans actions, showing her to be more dominant.
-Love through how close they are and how she holds his hand.
-Maddness through the man not being able to escape this walking dream.
-The wealth shown in the memory could show how valued it is by him.
-Death as he tells the memory to be damned.

Structural:
-Longer sentences linger during the memory.
-Shorter sentences as he comes bck to realty.

The Road - why are there less refrences to women than there are to men?

-The man wants to forget his wife.
-They are unimportant to the daily life of the man and the boy.
-Women are symbolic of life and reproduction, there is no more life in the world, no more women.
-The woman could not kill the boy and so killed herself, she then had no reason to be in the narrative.
-The mother is dead.
-The relationship between the man and boy becomes more established than it would have if the woman were still alive.
-Mother earth is no more as the mothers are dead and so is the world.
-The boy would not be so nieve if the woman was with them.
-The mother was more resourceful knowing that if she stayed then she would suffer more than pain, so ended her part in the story before it even started.

The pied piper of Hamelin rewritten by Liam Swan in the style of Cormac McCarthy

Rats. Screaming and scurrying. Searching frantically for food. Eating everything that they could and then moving onto the buildings, then people. Savaging children and babies and making nest in men’s hats and woman’s clothes overpowering the speech in the streets and making the people of Hamelin despair. This continued until the people, while weakened and encompassed in the misery created by these rodents , made their plight known to the mayor, who, decided, that there was, nothing, that he, the mayor, could, possibly, do. Through the flying doors appeared a strange hooded multi coloured figure colours burning the mayors eyes with their ferocity a bone flute to his lips pressed the mayor instantly spellbound to this magician of music.

I am the answer to your rattish problem my lord.

What? Who are you?

As I said previously my lord, I am the answer to the problem of this town.

How did you find out about the rats?

Sir. I have been around the world searching for those i need of my talents; I freed the Japanese of their dragons and cleansed the mosquitos of England .Give me a thousand gilders and it will be as though the problem had never existed.

One thousand? If you’ve done what you say you have done and get rid of the rats I will give you fifty thousand gilders.

Done.

Bone flute resting on his hips he walked past the broken doors, away from the stunned leader of Hamelin and out onto the road. Moistened lips. A breath of cold air. A glance at the starry sky. A neutral tone emerged from the end of the bone flute, gradually building in complexity until its tone became indescribable to the on looking populace. But the rats understood. Screaming and scurrying. Searching frantically for the source of the sound, they ran to the multi coloured man who, kicking a boy out of his way, then at pace ran away from the village towards the river Weser. Where all rats jumped. One survived.

I was promised food and drink to my fill. That the rats should rejoice as the world had become one big larder that we the rats owned. I’m the last rat. I’m the only rat.

Laughing hysterically at the state of the sodden rats corpses the man started his journey to a cave to spend the night, he did not eat. Or drink. For why would a person such as he require such sustenance. He would return in the morning to the village, collect his reward, and then be free of pain, free of need, until his service was required somewhere again.

Rain poured down upon the town of Hamelin but even this could not keep back the celebration. Their scourge had been appeased. The children where happy beyond words as they ran around screaming in excitement, searching for food and sweets to celebrate with. A congregation appeared including the mayor and other elders of the village. All where smiling as though their wildest wishes had dreams had come true. Upon a rooftop another figure had emerged.

People of Hamelin. We are finally free of the rats! Go to your homes and houses, clear the nests and repair the holes. We will never be under the control of these vermin again!

I hope you have my money my lord.

What? Who said that?

The solution to the rats. The reason that they are gone!

Ah yes you.

Do you have my thousand gilders?

You see what we agreed in council was hasty, instead of a thousand let me give you fifty?

Sir do not go back on your word so easily.

Well either take it or leave it, your job is done and you've nothing to make me give you the sum for which you ask.

Then my lord mayor, heed my warning, I will return, and you had better be ready for when I do.

The figure of colour faded into the darkness, as though he were one with the nothingness. The mayor however knew that nothing could come from their meeting, for what could a man with a flute possibly do? Days passed and the mayor forgot about the strange, many coloured man. The village of Hamlin became a normal community where the children were looked upon by all as the joy and life of the village.

A figure emerged. Dressed in black armless hooded hunters clothes. Dripping red fluid as he walked. Contempt spread across his face. Pain visible in his eyes. And the bone flute at his bloody mouth. They had done this to him. Fluid lips. His life blood fuelling his flute. No breath was needed as a cry emerged from within. The sweetest noise followed, and then, so did the children, their parents tried to beg them to stop, but, the music stopped all motion for them. Parents paralyzed and with smiles of joy cut. Across their faces, the children were happy and so followed the sweet sound until they saw the musician, his flesh decomposing as he moved. But they only saw the deliverer of their promised dream. Away the children danced in the road, the demons lure pulling them along. The eyes of every adult in Hamlin stuck on the sight of the hunter garbed figure, corroding, melting away, and revealing his true nature. He was not the answer to the village’s problems. He was the scourge.

 Up the streets danced the children along up to the river where they stopped. Looking into the Weser’s waters only to jump and skip on up the path to the mountains. As the children walked up the mountain path they heard the music splutter and begin weaving pictures in their minds of tree’s in full blossom and fruits floating through the air to them, of a wondrous life where no wrong could be done and that their happiness was all that matterd in a world of dreams. The path they were walking on had become dark; the darkness was creating a tunnel to a place below. They were losing control; deep in an emotionless slumber they were walking, dead to the world with only the lucid dream created in their minds to comfort them.

They stopped, though the children knew no difference, and the thing before them blowing into his bone opening a gapping cavern the darkness clawing towards them. Death was at hand, he made the children march into the opening; these would be his payment, his reward. He would drain them and become himself again, able to walk the earth once more until someone else refused him of his payment.

He forgot one boy. One small boy with a limp. A boy kicked by a man with unusual strength while walking out the town with rats on tow. This boy had walked behind his friends, the dream was not real to him so he had stopped listening and hobbled along at the back of the exodus, watching with wonder at the stages of the pipers physical state, how the man had started looking like a man just ill, then the skin had melted away and muscle had fallen as he was walking, playing the bone flute, his clothes forming a cloak while all that remained of the man was his bones. As the procession moved into the darkness the boy had stopped, knowing who it really was who had taken away his friends. The boy watched as the death took his friends into the cave. Staring back at the boy stood the skeleton, his bone flute in its hand, while a cacophony of screams emerged from the cave. After a second they ended. The skeleton however was changing, muscles winding around its body, organs bulging in between, beating as his movement returned, skin then covering the corpse. The clothes had changed into a many coloured garb. And as the boy started walking backwards the paralysis of fear leaving him, the figure put a long finger to his lips and disappeared.

The boy never saw any of the other children again but the memory of death haunted him, knowing that one day he would have to meet him again.

Timing

P. 36    "He woke whimpering in the night" this quote shows the effect of the night upon the characters, that they were vulnerable and their emotions started to show through, the effect of being vulnerable in the dark made them scared.
P. 87    "He woke in the night" not only does this show that it is night but also that the night means nothing to the characters, that they would wake in the night as they would in the morning, that time of day ment nothing to them.
P. 93    "In the evening they tramped across a field" again showing that even though it is evening they continue as though it was not as the time of day means nothing to them.
             "tomorrow they would find something" stating hope for the next day, this quote was unusal because it is the only moment when eitherof the characters actually experiences hope for anything.
P. 230  "an hour later" the novel does not tell you what the time is atall, so this quote only produces confusion into when the time was before and what the time is now, where in the day where they? and was it morning or afternoon or evening?
P. 300  "He slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father
             was cold and stiff." shows that the boy only woke up in the nights as he was afraid of something happening to his father, as he did not wake up through the night, this shows that he believes that his father is in a better place giving the idea that the boy has some knowledge of religeon.
P. 301  "He stayed three days" shows that the boy had nowhere to go, that the last person who meent anything to him was now dead and that the only people out there cold not be trusted.

The end

The begining of the end is where the man and boy arrive at the beach.
This is because the journey that the two had been on for the entrety of the book is now over and they have nothing left to do but eat what they have found on the ship and the slowly die.
The cares of the two are shown at the end here as the father dosent apologise for the world being the way it is, the state of their lives or the hoplesness of their lives, he instead says "sorry it's not blue" about the sea, thus showing that the two are realastic only caring about what is there and what wonders they want to see before their deaths.
The boy hopes for colour but in the end everything is "Cold, desolate, birdless, vast and cold" and gray. Everything on the road was the same, the ocean shows that the rest of the world is like this too.

The ending is when the father dies.
this is because everything so far in the book has been from the fathers point of veiw, this is the switchover to the son and the establishment of a new norm. Also throughout the novel the characters of the father and son are emotionless but at this point the characters show these previously unknown emotions. "you said you would never leave me" showing that the boy is still here and healhy beside his dieing father, that he will have to go on without the man. "I know. I'm sorry. You have my whole heart." the father finally lets his love for the child show through his words instead of his actions, the boy beys "Just take me with you, please" but because the father knows he loved the boy he could not bring himself to kill the boy showing that his wife was right at the begining of the novel, fulfilling the boys prophecy.

The ending is when the father dies.
- establishment of new norm
- theme of religeon "the breath of God"
- surrounding are not described as before.
- the awarness of time becomes fluidand nknown to the reader.
- links to his mother.

Deus ex machina - God is in the machine

The Road - Task 2 - episodes (part 6)

- the theft of the man and boy's belongings (pp. 270-278)
The main impact that this episode has is that of hope, McCarthy conveys this hope by telling us that the theif had come from a commune of people with laws and food, hope as that is somewhere that the man and boy could go to. The man and boy have a cart full of food and know that somewhere nearby there is a place of relative saftey, they could be going to the commune themselves after this event of they could continue walking with there large supply of food, however the death of the father could come before either as now the father cant even keep at a "jogtrot" without leaning over and coughing, ths could be fregrounding his death as slowly his cough has been getting worse through the novel. A moment of increased tension is at the point when the man discovers that all his possesions had been stolen, at this point he starts cursing himself for being careless with how he had left all the possesions under a "sail cloth" with no real security. The character of the boy is shown to have changed drastically as he becomes calm and serious when telling his father that instead of the man needing to worry it is the boys job to as he knows that his father is going to die and that he "is the one" who will be left alone. Speech and the type of languge are the same throughout the novel, the only parts which are different are in he story with the addition of the fahers knowledge of "communes". McCarthy shows that it is possible that the man and boy originally came from  commune as the father knows about them but is not in them now, hinting at how he may have been kicked out or walked off himself. the main importance of this episode is to show that there are places with people and law and order, but the father stays away from them for some reason.

Task 2 - episodes (part 5)

- getting to the shore (pp. 227 - 230)
This episode shows how uneventful the lifes of the man and boy where. The writer gains this responce as he keeps events to a mininum and instead concentrates on getting the two characters to the destination that they have been trying to get to for the entirety of the novel.
The ocean is the final destination of the man, all he wants throughout the novel is to get there and now tha he has, there is no real need for him to keep going. He has acheived his goal, he could die pretty soon after this event, leaving the boy with the gun. there is no real change of mood or any tension in this episode everything just seems grim and dark,  "the world grew darker daily", everything about the father seems to be getting dimer and closer to the end of his journey. The consant dark quotes from the father give the impression that he is getting more tired than usual and losing hope of survival while the boy has started learning from the man and actally plots the rest of their journey, keeping track of the time and where they were  "He had the names of towns and rivers by heart and he measured their progress daily." the language s the same as therest of the novel except darker imagery is used, "the world grew darker daily." as if everything is about o come to an end. All the language that the father uses if foregrounding his death and the hoplessnes of his and the boys continuation. This is a key episode as it shows the ending of the fathers enforced march and leaves the two characters not knowing where to go next.

Task 2 - episodes (part 4)

- the baby on the spit (pp. 210-215)
this episode impacts on the reader by showing how far people are willing to go to go without starving in a dead world, the "charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit" show that the young have no place in the post apocolyptic world and that they are easy food for the elder people walking along. The writer makes this stand out by not changing the rhythme or tone, just letting the event take place making it seem the norm, from the fathers reaction of just picking up the boy and whispering "I'm sorry." he could have been witness to this kind of thing before as other than his action with his son he shows no emotion towards it unlike how he had been repulsed by the semi-eaten people in the cellar. at the end of the episode we are told that they have eaten the last of their supplies and wilol begin to weaken within two days, this could be that they have finally run out of food and they are going to die or it could continue the trend of the rest of the novel in which just as the end seems inevitable they stumble onto anther supplie of food. A moment of increased tension is when the boy finds that the "black thing...skewerd over the coals" is infact a recently born baby that had been beheded and gutted, then over cooked and burnt. The tension is increased as the rhythm of the story lowers and then speeds up as this revalation appears. This episode is very much like when a number of semi-eaten people are found in a cellar as the rhythm fluctuations are similar. The language used echoes that of the previous eisodes as it is simple and yet affective at numbing emotion from this horrific scene. Death is foregrounded by the charred infant and the lack of food which is with the man and boy. This episode is key as it shows the desperation that the man and boy could get to, they could become cannibals in order to stay alive.

5+5=1

It means nothing to be alive in a dead world.
The thoughts running through a despairing fathers mind.
Using punctuation to create tension e.g. stalling as the father tried to stifle his coughs using full stops.
The fathers realization that he can not kill his son.
The characters scream at the reader at many points in the novel.
+
Nothing
Despairing
Stalling
Realization
Scream
=
Horror

Task 2 - episodes (part 3)

- finding the cellar of naked and mutilated people (pp. 112-121)
This episode gives the impresion of horror and misery as it plays upon the reallity of human farming for food in the novel. The writer evoked this responce by playing on older horror story lines to give a semi-original idea of what could be in a cellar under an old dserted house, the writer also slows the rhythme of the story, then speeds it up to build suspence to a false mment of horror "an old mattress darkly stained" so that the true moment of horror is realized "Huddeled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, sheilding their faces with their hands." which shocks the reader as nothing like this was expected. What happens next is clear, they would run away and continue their journey, more weary of strangers than before, but also now that the father has come to the revolation that he could never kill his son, we now that the boy will survive atleast even if the father does not. At the begining of the epiode time seems to slow as the father searches through the house and then goe to the back garden, time then speeds up as the half eaten people are found and the father and son run off, as time was slowing down however tension was building that something might happen. The fathers true character is realized in this episode as he realises that he could never kill his son as he questions himself "Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing?" also reffering to his son as "beloved" he tells the reader that he would never killhis son and that as much as he might want to, to save him from pain, he cant bring himself to kill the boy. McCarthy uses the same style of writting as he does in other areas of the novle but he gives the veiw from the mind of the father aswell as the other veiws that he normally gives. This is a key episode as it shows the kinds of people who are after him, and the difference between them and the bad guys.

instead of twittering

2nd paragraph, page 120
shows the thoughts which were running through the head of the father, this paragraph shows the fathers desperation by his thinking "What if it dosent fire? It has to fire. What if it dosent fire?" the desperation is reinforced by the repation. The paragraph also shows the fathers own self doubt as he knows that he could never bring himself to kill his son as he asks himself "Is there such a being within you of which you know nothing?" thus showing that he knows that he could never bring himself to harm his son who he referse to as "beloved". This paragraph is more about the detail and depth put into the fathers character than anything else.

Task 2 - episodes (part 2)

- shooting the 'roadrat' (pp. 62-69)
The episode shows how easily life is extinguished by anyone with the ability and the animalistic desperation felt by all people when faced with life and death. The writter achieved this responce by mainly influencing the characters speech into short threatening whispers, as though the character of the father knew hat he had to kill the "roadrat" and that in turn the "roadrat" would have to do something in turn to survive. This episode implies that in the future plot one of the two main characters may die, when the other is helpless to do anything for them, this is because if the father had not got the gun then he would hav ebeen helpless to go along with the "roadrat", if the boy was ever in the position of the father needing him, but the child being unable to help then the father would die. The scene seems to get darker with the enitial hiding away from the people and truck to killing one of the "roadrat"'s was a leap that the father would not have taken as after this event, only one of the two has the easy way out of shooting themselves. This event shows the degree's to which the father would have let people live as he tries to do everything in his power to get the "roadrat" to follow them, before letting him loose so he could get a good head start away from those likely to kill them, this scene also shows that the father was prepared to give his wa out of life to the "roadrat" in order to ensure his sons and his own survival. Repition is used to reasure the boy by his father saying "It's okay." and the tone used throughout the novel is also present in this as it shows the short sentence structure and few commas. This is a key episode as it gives mortality to the characters and shows how prepared the father is to ensure that they survive.