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.