The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Literature Analysis
By Hayden Robel
“People are at their best when they are
at their worst.”
- Jeff Bridges, Starman
GENERAL
1. Briefly summarize the plot
of the novel you read, and explain how the narrative fulfills the author's
purpose (based on your well-informed interpretation of same).
2. Succinctly describe the
theme of the novel. Avoid cliches.
3. Describe the author's
tone. Include a minimum of three excerpts that illustrate your point(s).
4. Describe a minimum of ten
literary elements/techniques you observed that strengthened your understanding
of the author's purpose, the text's theme and/or your sense of the tone. For
each, please include textual support to help illustrate the point for your
readers. (Please include edition and page numbers for easy reference.)
________________________________________________________________________
1. Inhabiting a bleak and
blasted post apocalyptic wasteland in what was once called the United States of America;
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road chronicles
the saga of the Man and his son the Boy as they travel in search of survival
and their very own salvation. A merciless land of cannibalistic raiders, scare
supplies such as food or water, the world of The Road is a character unto itself as well as the plot. McCarthy’s
destitute epic places less importance on the peccadillo’s of plot, who the
nameless Man and the Boy are than the actions and reactions of the morally
ambiguous characters over the course of their journey along the road. Whether
it be killing in cold blood of another human being (hostile or non), or
intentionally avoiding helping a fellow starving survivor, the Man and the Boy travel
along a moral crossway, neither black nor white, but gray that provides mankind
the path to become angels or the route to become devils. "(The Man) You
have to carry the fire. (The Boy) I don't know how to. (The Man) Yes you do.
(The Boy) Is it real? (The Man) The fire? Yes it is. (The Boy) Where is it? I
don’t know where it is. (The Man) Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always
there. I can see it." The Man’s final breaths disturb the ashen soil, charred
grounds on which he rest, on the road, his road, his journey over. His father’s
words echoing within, the Boy continues walking, a new life, a new group of
survivors, a new family, a new hope. A journey, a road with no destination, no
ends, Cormac McCarthy, thru The Road
and its characters, ultimately connotes this idea, message: hope. We must carry
the torch of hope, fire within us, like the Boy, even when the road, our road
is strewn with adversity we must always hope. The Road ends with this note as the Man dies and the Boy continues
without a father but with a new perception of life: hope, for change, for the
better, this is but one of Cormac McCarthy’s poignant purposes. On the road of
life we must always hope.
2. (I essentially
communicated my perception of this novels penultimate theme above but here’s a
snapshot) Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
stands as a testament to man’s capacity for “good” and “evil”. A moral
crossway, neither black nor white, but gray that provides man the path to
become angels or the road to become devils. Through the killing of another
being to live, to the illumination of one of life’s “ultimate truths”, hope, The Road conveys a menagerie of themes
along it’s route. Good and evil, morality in general, Cormac McCarthy’s
penultimate purpose (in my opinion) was to connote the theme of hope. Hope for
change, for the better, on the road of life, no matter the inevitable
challenges, we must always hope.
3. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, aside from JD Salinger’s
approaches to character/dialogue, is easily the most influential work in my own
writing. His expert craftsmanship of tone is unparallel when compared to modern
contemporaries, hell, most writers in the medium to date (NONARGUABLE…jk…BUT
NOT REALLY). Moody, haunting, provocative, really buzzwords can’t do the man
justice, McCarthy’s tone is strikingly visual, gothic and depressive in imagery
of its exceedingly dark world, as the following exemplifies.
·
“He walked out in
the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of
the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness
implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black
vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like
groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes
with which to sorrow it.” (pg. 110)
·
"The world
shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things
slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things
to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than
he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its
referents and so of its reality." (pg. 75)
·
“Human bodies.
Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. The
small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out
leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape
of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.” (pg. 76)
4. Here we go.
·
“(The Man) You
wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen
again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will
kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand? (The Boy) Yes. He sat there
cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. (The Boy) Are we still the
good guys? He said. (The Man) Yes. We're still the good guys." (pg. 65) The
Man killed another, another human, another being, to protect his son. Was it
justified? To bereave another of their life? There truly is no single answer,
whether there is an answer at all, McCarthy’s The Road frequently poses such an ethically challenging scenarios.
The Man killed to protect his loved one, to live, but did the road, reality,
force the Man to kill? Or was it the man who chose to kill? The Road rarely
delineates its morality, not “good” or “evil”, black or white, but shades of
fathomless gray, not directly fueling the Man’s decision, only indirectly
providing the theater, the backdrop for such an action. Cormac McCarthy’s a
genius of tone, characterization, world building, basically all things written,
no one can argue against this.
·
“Coming back he
found the bones and the skin piled together with rocks over them. A pool of
guts. He pushed at the bones with the toe of his shoe. They looked to have been
boiled. No pieces of clothing. Dark was coming on again and it was already very
cold and he turned and went out to where he'd left the boy and knelt and put
his arms around him and held him.” (pg. 110) Cannibalism is but one abominable
facet of the harsh world The Road
travels along. Here Cormac characterizes not just the cruel capacities of
desperate man but the Man’s, he a symbol (spoiler alert) of mankind’s, just as
able capacity for compassion as a father cradles, cherishes, his son. Can I wax
more poetic about you Mr. McCarthy? Yes.
·
“…Eyes closed,
arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix.
To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its
rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you
may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.” (pg. 19) Cormac is a spiritual
man and commonly ties beliefs and God into his writing. What I could discern
from the vague but visual imagery is McCarthy’s contemplation thru the Man’s
midnight reflections of what fate or destiny might be inevitable upon their
travels along the Road, but that’s just my ramblings. Anyways, wow, the
pendulum simile is masterful.
·
“The trees in
their ordered rows gnarled and black and the fallen limbs thick on the ground.
He stopped and looked across the fields. Wind in the east. The soft ash moving
in the furrows. Stopping. Moving again. He'd seen it all before. Shapes of
dried blood in the stubble grass and gray coils of viscera where the slain had
been field-dressed and hauled away. The wall beyond held a frieze of human
heads, all faced alike, dried and caved with their taut grins and shrunken
eyes. They wore gold rings in their leather ears and in the wind their sparse
and ratty hair twisted about on their skulls. The teeth in their sockets like
dental molds, the crude tattoos etched in some homebrewed woad faded in the
beggared sunlight. The heads not truncheoned shapeless had been flayed of their
skins and the raw skulls painted and signed across the forehead in a scrawl and
one white bone skull had the plate sutures etched carefully in ink like a
blueprint for assembly.” (pg. 140) Horrific and macabre imagery of human
atrocity is featured prominently throughout The
Road. Here we read the description of raider markers utilizing the
corporeal remnant of their victims to postmark territory/ threaten any
potential scavengers. In the words of Louis Armstrong, “what a wonderful
world!”.
·
“Huddled against
the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding
their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to
the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.”
(pg. 168) EWWWW! Unlike his somewhat romanticized descriptions/imageries as
exampled above, Cormac McCarthy uses simplicity or incredibly literal
structure/syntax/diction/imagery etc. in order to leave no disgusting detail to
the imagination. Stephen King would have a hard time emulating McCarthy’s
execution here….gross.
·
“In those first
years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing.
Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like
ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts.
Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways
like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old
and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of
a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around
you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time
at all.” (pg. 42) Cormac not only details the beginning behaviors of humans
right after the unspecified apocalypse with this description laden/deliberately
“simple” diction but the Boys lack of knowledge, frame of reference for the
past. Unlike the Man, the Boys reality has only ever been the harsh actualities
of post- apocalyptic Earth, such is the
cruel reality of the situation, the Boy will never live in peaceful society,
the world as his father knew it. Question this though: Is that a bad
thing?.....The more I think about it I-…Yep.
·
“Human bodies.
Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. The
small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out
leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape
of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again.” (pg. 76) Sorry for the
repeats but these passages were selected by me for a reason! (there
golden/gross examples of rhetoric….) I
particularly “enjoy” (not the content/subject of course, sicko) McCarthy’s
ironically beautiful simile here with “like the shape of a flower, a molten
rose.” When describing the contrastingly horrendous gore of this passage.
·
“He walked out in
the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of
the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness
implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black
vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like
groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes
with which to sorrow it.” (pg. 110) McCarthy…how can I ever achieve your level?
Honestly the beautiful imagery here is not superficial but provocative in its
connotative layers as The Man contemplates the apathy of the universe (“The
crushing black vacuum of the universe.”) and ultimately his God, questioning
how he may have such indifference to his creations suffering. Deep.
·
“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 and buried his face against
him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is
it? The boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What
the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening
on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him,
holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.” (pg. 276) Chilling,
that’s all I can amount to say. Cormac manages (with his use of decidedly
simple or literal syntax/structure and matter of fact diction description) to
muster a mixture of conflicting emotions as I read this excerpt where in the
father cradles the charred corpse of an infant. I can only imagine the horror a
father, the Man, endures, imagine what he maybe thinking: “What about my son?”
he says out of guilt, he says sorry not for himself but the hell the boy will
live his entire life within, the hell of the world, the never-ending road of
life.
·
"(The Man) You
have to carry the fire. (The Boy) I don't know how to. (The Man) Yes you do. (The
Boy) Is it real? (The Man) The fire? Yes it is. (The Boy) Where is it? I don’t
know where it is. (The Man) Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I
can see it." (pg. 234) As the Man treads on the threshold of death, he
illuminates the Boy, and the reader, of one of life’s “ultimate truths”. The
Man, enlightened by the harsh realities of the road, describes a fire, one
present within, perpetual and never completely waning. The Man describes the
fire of hope, the most fundamental element within all of mankind, all of us,
telling the boy that he must live on, and hope, hope for change, for the better,
survive the fire. A fire kindled by the fluttering embers of charred landscapes
of The Road, the road depicting once
again it is a character, depicting its capacity for “evil” as well as “good”,
our capacities. Cormac, please, teach me.
CHARACTERIZATION
1. Describe two examples of
direct characterization and two examples of indirect characterization.
Why does the author use both approaches, and to what end (i.e., what is your
lasting impression of the character as a result)?
2. Does the author's syntax
and/or diction change when s/he focuses on character? How?
Example(s)?
3. Is the protagonist static
or dynamic? Flat or round? Explain.
4. After reading the book did
you come away feeling like you'd met a person or read a character?
Analyze one textual example that illustrates your reaction.
___________________________________________________________
1.
Direct Characterization
·
EXAMPLE 1:
“(The Boy) Can I ask you something?
(The Man) Yes. Of course you
can.
(The Boy) What would you do
if I died?
(The Man) If you died I would
want to die too.
(The Boy) So you could be
with me?
(The Man) Yes. So I could be
with you.
(The Boy) Okay.” (pg. 11)
·
EXAMPLE 2:
The boy lay with his head in
the man's lap. After a while he said: They're going to kill those people,
aren't they?
(The Man) Yes.
(The Boy) Why do they have to
do that?
(The Man) I don’t know.
(The Boy) Are they going to
eat them?
(The Man) I don’t know.
(The Boy) They're going to
eat them, aren’t they?
(The Man) Yes.
(The Boy) And we couldn’t
help them because then they'd eat us too.
(The Man) Yes.
(The Boy) And that's why we couldn’t
help them.
(The Man) Yes.
(The Boy) Okay. (pg. 194)
Indirect characterization
·
EXAMPLE 1:
“The roadrat let go of the
belt and it fell in the roadway with the gear hanging from it. A canteen. An
old canvas army pouch. A leather sheath for a knife. When he looked up the
roadrat was holding the knife in his hand. He'd only taken two steps but he was
almost between him and the child.
(The Man) What do you think
you're going to do with that?
He didn’t answer. He was a
big man but he was quick. He dove and grabbed the boy and rolled and came up
holding him against his chest with the knife at his throat. The man had already
dropped to the ground and he swung with him and leveled the pistol and fired
from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet.
The man fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his
forehead.”
·
EXAMPLE 2:
“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 and buried his face against him. He
looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The
boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy
had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the
spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding
him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.” (pg. 276)
_____________________________________________________________
Cormac McCarthy is undeniably
a master of the written craft. Like most writers worth there weight he employs
a myriad of modes of characterization such as direct and in. Utilizing direct/indirect
characterization as depicted in the examples, McCarthy directly characterizes
the father, the Man, as loving and dedicated to his son, the Boy, the Man going
so far as to kill any and all who attempt to harm him. Indeed he cannot imagine
an existence without his son, his only salvation for what mankind has done. The
Boy is characterized directly by his questions/responses in conversations with
his father; he is innocent, ignorant, and somewhat desensitized to the harsh
realities he is relentlessly subjected to over his journey. The Boy is truly a
child one that must be protected by the inhospitable tendrils of turpitude birthed
by his world, the world of The Road. With
authentic dialogue backed by genuine, character substantiated motivations,
Cormac McCarthy’s use of direct and indirect characterization characterizes his
works like that of The Road as
paradigms of the craft. In order to convey quick but provocative concepts and
thought he uses direct (like in the conversations; DIRECT CHARACTERIZATION
EXAMPLES 1 & 2), yet thru indirect actions (like the description of the
deceased baby cradling (INDIRECT CHARACTERIZATION EXAMPLE 1) or roadrat killing
(INDIRECT CHARACTERIZATION EXAMPLE 2)) McCarthy engenders depth that only a
real person, not a character could ever possess. McCarthy has succeeded in what most authors
never will, creating people NOT characters.
2. Example:
“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 and buried his face against him. He
looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The
boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy
had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the
spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding
him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.” (pg. 276)
Yes, as identifiable from the
passage above, there is a subtle shift of emphasis from descriptions of scenery/scenario
to characterization pieces. If you observe the transition from dialogue-less
exposition to the Man’s “what is it?” you can begin to see McCarthy’s prose
place focus on the Man’s actions and the Boy’s reactions rather then further
building the scene with structured environmental descriptions. His diction is
delivered with deliberately simple word-choice/syntax to serve the description
of the Man’s actions and characterize him in the process as he picks up the
infants charred corpse and begins whispering “sorry”. In short McCarthy uses
action over words when characterizing his characters like the Man here. The Man
indirectly characterizes himself by whispering “sorry” not to the dead infant
but in actuality to his living son, the Boy, as the Boy is his own baby, able
to be burned, harmed by the world’s fires. He is whispering “sorry” to the Boy;
sorry for helping give birth to a son, condemn his flesh and blood to such a
cruel reality, the world in which they live. Sorry for condemning him to a
nearly hopeless bout of constant survival till death, sorry not for himself,
but the Boy when he knows he will eventually have to leave him, taken away from
the world by his God’s never timely will, sorry for leaving his son alone. Cormac
McCarthy is a master, subtly transitioning unnoticeably from description and
exposition to characterization, doing both in a same sentence process, a master
indeed.
3. The Road is more or less a moral crossway, neither black nor white,
but gray, fathomless in its shades, that provides man the path to become angels
or the route to become devils. Such is true to the character of the Man (who is
a symbol for mankind in general, brilliant). He is at times a loving,
religiously pious (as much as he can be in the apocalypse), father tenderly
tending to his child, yet, when the situation requires, he can be a
cold-blooded killer or calculatedly cruel human being to those not his kin
(i.e. not giving food to another lost boy because they need to preserve
resources or not helping an inured elderly man dying on the road for a few
examples). Subsequently the Man is not a “dynamic character”, nor is he
“static”, he is a person. Cormac McCarthy has crafted one of the most realistic
renditions of a human(s) I have read in literature, the Man as morally
ambiguous and grey in character/action as any living human being. Even the Boy is
as innocent/ignorant/inquisitive as any “real” child. The Man and the Boy of
Cormac McCarthy’s creation are not characters “dynamic” or “static” but mirrors
of mankind, real, genuine, true people, indiscernible from us whether they
walked in the texts and lines of a page or the sidewalk of our streets. I think
we humans give ourselves a little too much credit in our “dynamic” diversity of
character, just sayin.
4. I essentially answered the
first part of this question in the above (CHARACTERIZATION question #3) so lets
move the the quotation analysis.
Example:
“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 and buried his face against him. He
looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? The
boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy
had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the
spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding
him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.” (pg. 276)
Not to beat the dead horse to
a bloody, bone-meal grinded, pulp, this passage is not only one of my favorite
in the entire novel (second only to “the fire is inside you” portion) but truly
illustrates the humanity of the Man. (Quoted from my response in
CHARACTERIZATION question # 2) The Man indirectly characterizes himself here by
whispering “sorry” not to the dead infant but in actuality to his living son,
the Boy, as the Boy is his own baby, able to be burned, harmed by the world’s fires.
He is whispering “sorry” to the Boy. Sorry for helping give birth to him,
condemn his own flesh and blood to such a cruel reality, the world in which
they live. Sorry for condemning him to a nearly hopeless future, a constant
bout of survival till death. The Man whispers “sorry” not for himself, but the
Boy when he knows he will eventually have to leave him, taken away from the
world by his God’s never timely will, leaving the Boy alone. The Man is sorry
just as any real person would authentically feel, he is a person living not in
our world but in his own, yet a person all the same. The Man, even the innocent/ignorant/inquisitive Boy, are people,
a family as true as our own, The Road
their world, not far from ours, Cormac McCarthy both their god and father. The Road is indeed a masterpiece in the
truest, greatest sense of the word, a note of not despair but hope. For change,
for the better, on the road of life we must always have one thing: hope. Its
all we can do, hope and believe.
