Thoughts: The Road

Title: The Road
Author: Cormac McCarthy
Year: 2006
Audiobook Length: 6 hours 45 minutes
First Lines: "When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.  Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before."




Let's be real.  The Road is not a happy book.  In fact, it is disturbing and terrifying.  Certainly, it does not portray a world in which I ever want to live or contribute to creating in the future.  The shear desolation depicted by McCarthy is remarkable.  I could all too clearly see the images that he crafted and feel the emotions of the nameless father and son as they trudged along the road. 

In McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world, the landscape is coated in gray ash that seemingly permeates every available space.  As the father and son slowly make their way down the road towards the sea, they must remain vigilant against "bad guys" with cannibalistic tendencies, while battling starvation, sleep deprivation, and endless hopelessness.

The brightest spot of the entire novel is the father's love and devotion to his son.  The boy does call his father "Papa," but we are never told any other names for either of them.  I think McCarthy's decision to leave the father and son nameless is a deliberate attempt to prevent the reader from brushing off the possibility that this pair could be one's self or loved ones.  This boy and his father represent all of us. 

I actually picked up this audiobook on a whim at the library, even though the book had been on my TBR since its release.  I wanted something for my commute the next day and grabbed it five minutes before the library closed.  This turned out to be a happy accident, as I found that the gruff, grim tone of the narrator's voice enhanced the effect of McCarthy's words.

Finishing The Road did not leave me with any positive feelings about the future or potential solutions to prevent such a world from existing.  It seems like most dystopian works have a sense of battling and overcoming the "bad" in some way.  There is a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.  I did not feel that here.  The Road is about the time in between the fall of one society and the rise of another.  It is hopeless, frightening, and heart-breaking, but also worth reading.