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Originally Posted by Abecedary
Thanks for starting this thread and thanks for your thoughts, Ea.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!
I took a break from reading Infinite Jest to read The Road in time for this discussion, and the two writing styles couldn't be farther away from each other. Where Wallace can literally go for pages on end without introducing a period (and these are dense pages, mind you), McCarthy isn't afraid to have a sentence that's comprised of a single word. And because he's carefully chosen every word he's written, it works to great effect. The language is sparse, but exact. He paints a vivid picture, but doesn't get bogged down in detail. After reading the book, I'm not sure if I even want to see the movie, because I know my interpretation and visualization won't match the filmmakers'.
As for the book itself, I don't recall if he ever indicated what the exact cause of the devastation was. All we know is that it's years after some cataclysmic event. I think it's safe to say it's the result of nuclear war, but again, it's never explicitly stated.
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Actually, on pp. 52-53, he does describe what caused the devastation, if indirectly. First, he mentions a 'long shear of light', which would describe the light coming from a nuke exploded high in the sky to generate an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), which would fry communications systems and knock out power supplies. Unless situated in windowless rooms, virtually everyone in North America would see the light from such an explosion because it happens so far up in the atmosphere.
Then we learn how the man in the story tries to turn on the bathroom light but it won't turn on, because the power has been knocked out by EMP. Next, readers learn that he hears the low concussions of relatively distant nuclear strikes, and this is supported by him seeing 'A dull rose glow in the windowglass.' That glow is what you could expect to see from multiple detonations for a few seconds after the initial flash fades.
Lastly, his wife asks him why he's filling up the tub to take a bath. He says he's not. What he's doing is trying to get as much of a water supply as possible, knowing that there won't be any water that comes out of a tap for a long, long time to come, since the water plants would have been destroyed in the attack.