The RoadCormac McCarthy

Book Report

Matthew McNiece

WRI 111 – Dr. B. – Fall 2013

What is The Road?

• Set in post-apocalyptic world

• Assumed to be US because of “state roads”

• Tells story of a man and his son trying to survive

• Boy grows throughout novel

• Pretty Depressing/Sad

Style Makes it Special

• Fragmented and simple sentences

• No use of quotation marks

• World is (mostly) gray

• Dialogue created with new linesLet’s take a look.

Its’s really scary, Papa.

There’s no one here. It’s okay. (McCarthy 198)

Figurative Language and Imagery

• Most Striking Literary Feature

• Frequent when:

• Describing surroundings

• Dreams

• Opening and Closing Scene

• Opening Paragraph

• Alt Link

Cormac McCarthy

• Born 1933

• American

• Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Western, Southern Gothic

• Pulitzer Prize for The Road

• 2 sons, book is dedicated to one of them

Apocalypse How?

• Post-Apocalyptic

• No explicit reference to cause of apocalypse

• Survival, travel, and death

Selected Quotes

“Are we still the good guys? He said.

Yes. We’re still the good guys.

And we always will be.

Yes. We always will be.

Okay.” (McCarthy 77)

• Repeated Mantra

• Boy’s favorite word

Selected Quotes Part II

• Context: Man and boy are nearly starving, smell something cooking at a camp and walk in to find it abandoned.

They walked into the little clearing, the boy clutching his hand. They’d taken everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned around and buried his face against him…What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. (McCarthy 198)

Potential Ethical Issues

• “Good Guys”

• What defines a “good guy”

• Scavenging, stealing, violence, don’t trust others

• Scope is reduced because of lack of interaction

• Boy becomes source of ethics (Latz)

Recommendation

• Yes, as long as you can bear a sad story, with some light at points.

Works Cited

Latz, Andrew B. "Beyond Unknowing." Beyond Unknowing. N.p., 10 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Nov. 2013. <http://beyondunknowing.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-road-ethics-in- a-situation-of-scarcity/>.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.