Quote:
Originally Posted by montsnmags
Could it be that this is not only a good point, but the point behind any ambiguity? That he did not want it to become a specifically nuclear-disarmament tract? Perhaps wanted to, if at all, look beyond what type of weapon was used, and more to that they were used at all (and that it continued)?
Cheers,
Marc ([quoting Family Guy] "You can't hug your children with nuclear arms!")
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Exactly. The indirect references to an apparent nuclear attack are rather peripheral to the main story, anyway and intended to establish setting rather than operate as a plot device. In that sense, the reader is reassured that
The Road is not just another work of post-apocalyptic survival fiction, with scary mutants roaming the land and all that other lurid hoo-ha.
The way I see it,
The Road is not really about the mechanics of surviving catastrophic situations. What it does express, and express well, is the lengths parents sometimes will take to help their children. It's also an exploration of the meaning of the father-son relationship and how deep it can be. All that the two main characters literally had left in the world was each other, and each was each other's world. It's a beautiful, if ultimately heartbreaking thread in the story.
Some argue that McCarthy was being pretentious by taking a page out of e.e. cummings' playbook and refusing to use proper punctuation. I disagree with that assessment.
What I think he was trying to do was develop a stripped-down kind of diction, something that would help buttress the unremittingly stark and grey imagery he uses throughout the book. After all, survivors of an apocalyptic event are not going to be worried about niceties like proper punctuation, if they even have time to write to begin with!