While reading The Road, I was reminded of a photo album. It seemed the best way to interpret the sparse style by which McCarthy wrote the novel. Instead of chapters, the book is broken into small sections, every scene getting its own break, like snapshots. This did make for easier reading, as you could just break wherever you wanted after looking at each particular “snapshot” and taking in the images, the progress, and getting whatever meaning you want out of it. It also works for isolating the primary emotions of the book, namely fear, hope, and love.
By breaking the piece into such small sections, the novel can deliver an intense and emotional scene, such as the confrontation with the cannibal where the father expends one of the last two bullets, and then break it off, giving the reader a chance to “catch his breath” so to speak.
I was still left asking a few questions at the end of the piece, however. The boy and his father survive for the most part because of the father’s numerous skills, as he’s apparently an experienced woodsman, has knowledge of boats, and is a marksman (and is apparently has quite the florid vocabulary for his interior monologues). While it’s certainly not unbelievable for a person to possess such skills, there’s never any reason given as to how he acquired them. I would have been satisfied at some offhand comment that would have implied he’d been a Boy Scout, but that would require a look at the past, and apparently the father cannot look upon his past unless it involves some form of despair. While this is also understandable, considering everything that’s been lost (as well as his wife’s suicide shortly after giving birth), with the amount of luck that the two protagonists experience, I would think that the father would be grateful for something in his past.
The luck is something else that I took minor issue with, though in some circles it’s referred to as “script immunity”. During the whole piece, the reader is reminded of the horror and fear of the “wolf at the door”, namely other people. While the reader is treated to plenty of ideas, and of course the “slaughterhouse” in the basement of one house, there’s never any real confrontation with the feared cannibals. They remain almost permanently in the background, with two appearances to confirm that it’s not just paranoia (though if I had access to a DSM-V I could easily write up the father with PTSD and chronic paranoia, and probably tuberculosis). Also, even though the father and son were starving, I never really felt they were in danger (it does take the father several hundred pages to die, after all), and while I did feel relief when they discovered the bomb shelter filled with food, the matter of finding it smacked of deus ex machina (as did the boat, and the family that takes in the son at the end).
Still, the book does accomplish its purpose, which is love and hope triumphing in the face of fear and futility, “carrying the fire” as the father and son so eloquently put it, though it seems to do it in the most bittersweet way possible. Even though the son is found after his father finally succumbs to illness, it’s simply a matter of time before the new group runs out of food or is attacked by cannibals. To use the cliché, the book felt of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://vaughndemont.com/2018/07/14/the-road-saturday-book-club/