The Road

When I read “The Road”, I felt cold, alone, scared of the darkness around me, of the bleakness of it all. Cormac McCarthy has carefully constructed a world that sucks you in from the first page and literally spits you at the last page. You can’t escape, because there is no escape for the protagonists either. You cannot take a break; there are no chapters. You are submerged in his relentless universe. You cannot navigate yourself, you cannot go back to a specific point in the book. In other words, you feel like the characters; you can only move forward, not knowing where it will lead you.

You are not reading a post-apocalyptic novel but rather you are in it!

Time is disrupted, you cannot count the days, there is no regularity. Names are gone, everything is striped naked. For me, the lack of names makes it easier to identify with the characters. It also creates a sense of intimacy; if you only know two people in the world, yourself and your father, then why would you need names? There is no society; individuation works differently in McCarthy’s barren and dead landscape. Grey, bleak, colorless and depressing, a dying species is trying to survive in a dying planet.

Action begins in media res, we don’t know what happened before, we don’t know what will happen after. It’s not action that’s important; it’s the language, the breathtakingly beautiful language.

The dialogue is very minimalist, but the language of descriptions is so poetic, overwhelming. Throughout the book, there are many moments where description follows the main character’s stream of consciousness. Thoughts race each other, they are repeated; there is rhythm, power.

“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone”.

“The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening”.

“He dreamt of walking in a flowering wood where birds flew before them he and the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds. Lying there in the dark with the uncanny taste of a peach from some phantom orchard fading in his mouth. He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would all be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory”.

The language of the novel helps us find beauty in ugliness, hope in despair. The end for me symbolizes a moment of profound optimism (at least for the standards of this novel). But it’s up to you to determine how you see it. If you like post-apocalyptic novels, this is a book that you should definitely read.

 Elle Papadopoulou