The Road begins in media res with a third person omniscient narrator describing the man checking upon the boy. The narrator likens the man and boy to pilgrims and describes the man's dream of being in a cave but unable to reach death. The boy then wakes and they eat but there is an ever present sense of danger, reinforced by the narrator detailing that "This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now that it was day. The man and boy move on, a few days pass where the setting is revealed and then eventually they come across a gas station and fill up their petrol canisters for their slag lamp. The man contemplates his past and remembers his wife. The man and boy reach a supermarket where they share their first coke before continuing with their journey.
Throughout the book all characters are nameless except for Ely at the very end. This namelessness helps McCarthy to create a world in which man made conventions and systems are rendered somewhat useless and all human qualities have vanished. This enables McCarthy to cause the reader to willingly suspend their disbeliefs and believe and attempt to understand the subverted moral code that exists on the road. The boy is the only character that resembles something that the reader can relate to. This means that the reader identifies with the boy and can emotionally connect with the horrific situation that he resides in.
McCarthy repeats key words such as "gray", "cold" and "ash". This repetition is pivotal to the reader being able to visualise the scenery of the road. The only way that the reader can form some sort of image of the road is through the narrator's descriptions and the man's occasional memories of a life before the apocalypse. This makes the section seem bleak and depressing, much like the prospects of the man and the boy are. This foreshadows the man's eventual death as when one dies their skin is said to acquire a grey tone and become cold, this description matches that by McCarthy relating to the desolate nature of the road.
A key event in this section is when the man and boy share a Coca-Cola. This is extremely significant as in America this is considered to be somewhat of a tradition between fathers and sons. It also emphasises the post-apocalyptic genre as characters are usually required to adapt to a situation that has been stripped back to bare basics when in comparison to the world that existed prior to the apocalypse. This enables McCarthy to some extent satirise the consumer driven materialistic nature of most modern readers of the novel and present the absurd nature of the items and aspects that people deem to be of importance.
Biblical language is used heavily in this section and towards the end of The Road. The man refers to the boy as the word of God, claiming that "If he is not the word of God God never spoke". This relates to the dream that the man had in which the boy lead the father to death as the man could not attain death alone. McCarthy is able to reveal through this that the boy is the most important character and is a means to the man's end. The boy is also the man's main reason for living which forebodes the way in which the boy is able to inspire compassion in the man, preventing him from killing the robber and feeding Ely.
McCarthy, in this section, prepares the reader for the horrific events that will follow by using skeletal and decaying language. "The city was mostly burned", "everything dead to the root" and "an advertisement in ten foot faded letters". This illustrates the decay and fall of all civilisation, implying that the back bone of moral structure in society has been eroded. All that remains is the burned ashen leftovers of society, which is also descriptive of the human that live on the road. These humans have no moral standing and are what would, in a functioning society, be considered as the scum, grime and plague on civilisation. This all makes the cannibalism, paedophilia and rape all become seemingly acceptable. However McCarthy never makes it clear whether the perpetrators have always been evil or their situation drove them to these measures.
Pages 1-28 of The Road lay the foundations for the rest of the novel. McCarthy establishes a clear mixture of genres and styles which all foreshadow and amount to the events that culminate later in the novel.
This is a very good first response Jaz. You endeavour to support your points with evidence from the text and on occasion you also manage to make connections to wider thematic debates.
ReplyDeleteA target to work upon is your connection to 'form', remember this is a 'road' novel which (as Cameron wrote) employs bricolgae to merge high and low culture references. Try and identify where within these first 28 pages that sense of bricolage is present (the coca cola sequence is certain a 'low culture' reference.
16/21