The Road: pages 1-51.

This blog was originally going to be an extra credit site for my English class, but I never really followed through with it. However, I thought I'd leave the first post I ever made, in case my English teacher ever comes across it :)

We just started reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Already the book is different than most all the books I've read. McCarthy's style is unique, but it's making the reading a little more difficult to follow. He uses very little punctuation, and no quotation marks. There are no chapters - this is one long, continuous story, much like the journey this man and his son seem to be on. The very vivid descriptions of this post-apocalypse world remind me a great deal of the movie 2012, which is also about the end of the world and features natural disasters, and a cloud of ash that covers the entire United States. It's not the same exact story idea, but it gives me a really good image to consider while I'm reading. Also, I'm really curious about The Road movie. It seems to me like the movie would have some pretty big shoes to fill considering the compelling and dramatic nature of the novel.

On the first few pages of the novel, the narrator describes a dream of a creature in a cave. I feel like the dream symbolizes the dark things to come in the novel. On page 5, the man refers to his child as "his warrant" and "the word of God", perhaps hinting that he's lost all faith in this cold world, but this boy is the only thing he is able to have faith in. I've also noticed that McCarthy uses the word "plastic" a lot in the first scene of the novel. Perhaps he is trying to convey a sense safety in the dangerous world they're in, since plastic is usually thought of as a "safe" material.

Further into the novel, the man begins having flashbacks to the previous world. On page 18, he dreams of his "bride". The dream portrays her as beautiful, and it seems as though they were once happy, but the next sentence after the description of the dream talks about the snow that's falling. I think this is a symbolic way of saying that their marriage had a cold end. On page 36, the boy's dream about the wind-up penguin strikes me as very creepy. The boy seems to be afraid and it symbolizes the zombie-like state of the other survivors who are wandering around this desolate world. On the last page of today's reading, the man take a picture of his wife out of his wallet and lays it in the middle of the road and leaves it there. This is odd to me because in his flashbacks, he seems to have such warm, vivid memories of her, so why would he want to leave her memory behind?