Discussion: "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy

[jaxx6166]

They also turned No Country... into an "action flick/thriller" if I'm not mistaken. I don't think we have anything to worry about here. =)

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Laz116

Judging from the trailer, they are turning it into an action flick (hope it's misleading):

Hmmm, that's pretty much how both it and No Country for Old Men read to me. Yeah there was a lot of Father/Son relationship stuff in The Road, but it was all punctuated by extreme action - survival - fighting - running - hiding etc.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

With you Bhartman. Much as I love McCarthy's writing, his pretentious abuse/unuse of punctuation really gets up my nose. Punctuation has slowly developed over time to allow an author to communicate more clearly with his reader; to ignore it is to show arrogance, if not contempt, I think. N

I was actually quite impressed how well it worked. He certainly doesn't stick to the usually recognised rules, but it's still very readable. It's not bad grammar - it's different rules. I can be quite a stickler for the usual rules as weil, but I tried to approach this as if it was poetry - poets don't always stick to the rules either. Anyway, I think it was written in a way that served that lack of punctuation.

I remember only handful of sentences where I felt it ran on without a comma, but it wasn't a big deal. With the minimalist punctuation, it felt simple and smooth.

A couple of times it was not completely clear who was who in a dialogue - but then when I started over to track who was who, it struck me that it really wasn't necessary. It didn't matter who said what, but that it was said at all.

Originally Posted by jaxx6166

As for the destruction of the world, I think it just...got sick...
Kind of like pollution, global warming, over population. The world just got sick and died. Like every other living thing.
[...]
Hell, even the ocean was dead. It was like everyone and everything just gave up.

This is a very interesting and creative way of putting it. Makes me think of things that live in cycles; such as onion type plants - they grow, flower and die, and start over. Now I am reminded of the Inca mythology, in which the world has gone thorugh several ages. We're in a world that has just gone through a cataclysm.

[GizmoPlanet]

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.

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.

[jaxx6166]

Hrm. You know, I don't remember that. I'll have to go back and check. =)

[kennyc]

I also have the pbook went to this page and yes. I did not remember the bathtub thing and the other pieces are all so brief and quick that I really have not paid much attention, but the clocks stopping, if literal and not poetic would indicate an EMP and the flashes etc, could be any kind of bombs, but still for me the rest of the descriptions of no life (other than apparently one case of apples, no fish, no animals, dead trees etc just don't jive with me if it were nuclear. Yes there would be dead animals and plants in the vicinity of the bombs but evidence of radiation or it's effects were not evident in any of the travels, but the complete absence of life was and I don't think that would be a result of nuclear destruction -- there would still be life scraping by in many many ways -- perhaps just hanging on due to nuclear winter, but certainly still there, particular in the water and oceans I would think.

[GizmoPlanet]

Originally Posted by kennyc

I also have the pbook went to this page and yes. I did not remember the bathtub thing and the other pieces are all so brief and quick that I really have not paid much attention, but the clocks stopping, if literal and not poetic would indicate an EMP and the flashes etc, could be any kind of bombs, but still for me the rest of the descriptions of no life (other than apparently one case of apples, no fish, no animals, dead trees etc just don't jive with me if it were nuclear. Yes there would be dead animals and plants in the vicinity of the bombs but evidence of radiation or it's effects were not evident in any of the travels, but the complete absence of life was and I don't think that would be a result of nuclear destruction -- there would still be life scraping by in many many ways -- perhaps just hanging on due to nuclear winter, but certainly still there, particular in the water and oceans I would think.

McCarthy was probably taking a bit of poetic licence with the aftereffects of nuclear war so he could give the reader a sense of just how unremittingly bleak everything was. Even in the heaviest areas of fallout, the radiation levels would be pretty low two weeks after the attack. Low enough not to pose any serious danger, anyway. You'd still want to stay well away from the actual ground zero areas, of course, as they would be quite radioactive for a very long time to come.

No question that some animals would survive, simply because they would have been in areas that got little or no fallout. However, in large parts of the US eastern seaboard, where the story appears to be set, there'd be a lot of dead animals -and people too. Fish would survive anywhere because fallout only contaminates the top layer of a body of water and any radioactivity would be neutralized by the water itself at sub-surface levels.

However, nuclear winter (as an outcome of a global nuclear war) is a phenomenon that was debunked a long time ago. Sure, you would have some obscuration of the lower atmosphere for a couple of weeks in zones where lots of ground bursts took place. In such areas the temperature would drop a bit, but not permanently.

Having said all that, I also realize that The Road was not meant to be a realistic appraisal of the effects of general nuclear war.

[kennyc]

Agreed. I think the entire novel is as poetic as it is realistic.

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by GizmoPlanet

...
Having said all that, I also realize that The Road was not meant to be a realistic appraisal of the effects of general nuclear war.

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!")

[kennyc]

Marc, I agree and believe this is actually the over-riding theme of the entire book -- the ambiguity -- the random and uncaring nature of the universe -- along with the/our/humanities drive to survive.

[Ea]

I think there is enough information in the book to point to some kind of man-made cataclysm, but purposely too vague to tell exactly how because the point is in how human life is adapting to the situation.

It was a little strange how devoid the landscape is of animal life - with a lot fewer humans around they'd have room, and there were grasses and trees, i.e. food for herbivores - and thus food for carnivores.

I also wondered a great deal about all the dried corpses. One would imagine that bacteria would have started to break them down. It wasn't all that dry, there was rain and snow, and streams and rivers. I the boy was born right after the catastrophe, and he's about 10 years, it would be quite some time.

[curtw]

Originally Posted by Laz116

For me the book was really about the hope of inner life. Even when everything on the outside is as grim as it gets, man's faculty for beauty, for hope, for love is still intact: The stark contrast between an outer, hopelessly destroyed, nature and an inner nature which seems to almost create beauty and hope by the sheer force of will.

That is why I see the novel as very hopeful and not pessimistic at all: Even in the face of total destruction, hope is still stronger than despair. Love stronger than death.

The beautiful prose is a triumph of inner life and of humanity.

Which pretty much supports my theory that the whole book is simply a post-apocalyptic retelling of The Old Man and the Sea.

[Good Old Neon]

I think this passage from Michael Chabon’s review of the The Road pretty much says it all:

What emerges most powerfully as one reads The Road is not a prognosticatory or satirical warning about the future, or a timeless parable of a father's devotion to his son, or yet another McCarthyesque examination of the violent underpinnings of all social intercourse and the indifference of the cosmic jaw to the bloody morsel of humanity. The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing— as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited. It is in the audacity and single-mindedness with which The Road extends the metaphor of a father's guilt and heartbreak over abandoning his son to shift for himself in a ruined, friendless world that The Road finds its great power to move and horrify the reader.

Incidentally, I have the final sentence from DFW’s Infinite Jest tattooed on my right forearm.

“And when he came back to, he was flat on his back in the freezing sand, and it was raining out of a low sky, and the tide was way out.”

A photo of the tattoo, along with its origin story can be found here:

http://www.contrariwise.org/2009/08/15/infinite-jest/

I’m planning a second tattoo on my left forearm, this one will be a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s, All the Pretty Horses:

He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.

The “single flower” is a reference to my daughter, Lily.

[Ea]

Originally Posted by Good Old Neon

I think this passage from Michael Chabon’s review of the The Road pretty much says it all: [...]

It must be in the eye of the beholder. I am not a parent. For me, the interpretation of the boy and the man being carriers of civilisation and of a hope for the future rings truer.

PS: Who/what is DFW?

[Good Old Neon]

Originally Posted by Ea

PS: Who/what is DFW?

The writer, David Foster Wallace.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace