Father Son Bonding But Make It Traumatic

Hello, and welcome back to my blog! It’s crazy to think I am almost done with this amazing book, and while I wish I could say I believe that McCarthy will wrap up the loose ends, I sincerely doubt the ending could be anything but ambiguous. But that’s a topic for next time! One of the key elements that I have tried to focus on while reading this book is what makes it appropriate for an Advanced Placement class. One of the distinct aspects of the novel that makes it AP-worthy is its allegorical telling of the evaporation of society, painting a moral query similar to The Lord of the Flies; what do we become when moral society falls? As discussed in former posts, the struggle to remain “good” in a lawless world of dissolved morals is a consistent theme throughout the novel, and the central struggle for the son. The son often struggles when they must do something that seems wrong, and asks his father for reassurance. When they must flee a house filled with people who are being kept pris...

Hello, and welcome back to my blog! As I have read further into Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, an interesting thing I’ve noticed is the way that he develops his characters. One of the things that makes McCarthy’s character development unique is the first person limited narration that confines are knowledge of the world to the conscious of the narrator. All we learn of him, as well as his son is through his eyes, and due to the book’s format as a more stream of consciousness than a direct address to the reader, a great deal of the information we learn about the son is out of context. Here’s what I have been able to deduce about the narrator so far. First and foremost, we understand that the father is a deeply sentimental man, a trait defined by his descriptions of the world around him, and his pondering of the natural world. An example is one of his trains of thought wherein he ponders, “They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: how does the never to be ...

The works of Cormac McCarthy have remained on my to-read list for many years now, and I am finally delving into his last novel, The Road. The novel is narrated by a nameless father trekking across the post apocalyptic United States with his son, trying to survive the barren and ashen land in search of something, anything. While the plot of this novel is interesting, what drew me in as I began reading was McCarthy’s unique style. Throughout the beginning of the novel, the landscape is described repetitively as being blind. McCarthy repetitively describes the grayness of the Earth, but even one of the first sentences of the novel garners a description of both the monochrome and sightless surroundings, “[Days] [l]ike the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world,” (1). This unsettling simile shows the world as both an opaque wasteland and a sightless Earth. Due to McCarthy’s descriptions of this setting as Godless as well, I believe the blindness McCarthy describes could be symbo...