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.