The Road

While I was reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I really noticed how the format of the book has really affected my reading. At times it makes it more difficult to read and understand, but after reading the passage a couple more times, it becomes clear. McCarthy's abandonment of quotations and sometimes grammar coupled with his imagery compliments the book. It puts this apocalyptic society in order, that grammar is not what is important in this world or time anymore, that rules (grammar and society's laws) are no longer functioning or vital. The father and son are fighting for their lives in almost every way possible. They are on the road to the south to where they might have a chance of survival, if they can survive their trip there. One scene's imagery really burned itself into my mind. It demonstrates the effectiveness of McCarthy's imagery. The father and son had just slept in an abandoned truck and now are continuing on their journey to the south (46). They come upon a trailer in page 47, and the father decides to go in and see if he can find anything useful inside the trailer for them. He finds a skylight on the roof and climbs in. What he finds is horrifying- dead bodies "sprawled in every attitude." He describes the bodies as "dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes." The book up until this point has always been direct to the point of harshness in describing the conditions of the world, but this scene really puts it into context. It is a scene that is extremely hard to ignore and makes it almost impossible to continue seeing glimmers of hope that the boy and his father have a chance to survive. When the father entered the trailer, he lit some magazine papers on fire so he could see around him. When the flames start to die out, they are described as "leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose." A rose was a symbol of hope and romanticism and love, but these papers took the shape of a "molten rose", signifying that hope, romanticism, and love have no place in this world anymore. The last sentence of the passage seals the feeling of impending doom with simply stating, "Then all was dark again." This statement is straight to the point, leaving no room for doubt. McCarthy utilizes imagery to instill the conditions of the world in the reader's mind and plays with the idea if the father and son actually have a chance for survival by inserting little glimmers of hope and then diminshing that hope by accenting a mostly desperate world all throughout the book.