I’m sitting here listening to Omar Khairat, an Egyptian composer, because it’s the only lyric-less music I can think of that I have on my computer, and it’s very conducive to doing homework. But that’s neither here nor there with regards to this class and this particular blog entry, is it? So, moving on…
The end of the world has been on my mind a LOT lately. I blame this class, for the most part, in doing that to me; I never would have considered it to such depths before. At least, I wouldn’t have considered it from an academic perspective. That’s not entirely true, of course – I would have attempted to put a scholarly touch to it, to find some facts that put everything into some sort of sense. For the most part, though, I would have just sat back and had a bit of fun with it, as it were. In thinking about the end of the world, I’ve also been thinking about the problems in the world (as I see them, at least) and how they may lead to the end.
A particular Bon Jovi line spoke to me yesterday: “How can someone kill in the name of God and say it’s right? How can money lead to greed when there’s still hungry mouths to feed?”[1] Now, I know they’re not directly connected, but those lyrics had me thinking about The Road. At least, the first part did. I know, it doesn’t make sense. The man (heretofore unnamed, though I’ll call him Vigo [after the actor who played him in the movie] when a name is necessary – although that might be something to explore – the anonymity implied in not having a name, the lack of individuality in a highly individual world – a world that is now comprised, for the most part, of only individuals. That is, the world we see in the book, though we hear about communes.) doesn’t kill in the name of God; he kills to protect his son. The claim to the contrary might be in that he claims it is his God-given duty to do so – to protect his son no matter the cost.
I beg the reader’s indulgence for a moment, though, as I’d like to air my complaints about the book before I forget them. One: the writing style. There are no quotation marks around any spoken words, and the style of writing had me questioning who was speaking throughout the entire novel. Yes, it was a third-person omniscient narrator, but the dialogue scenes were quite confusing. I was able to figure out who was speaking after a small bit of investigation, but a reader should never have to investigate like that to understand who is speaking. Second, there are no chapter breaks (though there are section breaks). I understand that this may be McCarthy’s writing style, and I can appreciate how it can represent the continuity, the banality, and the sameness of everyday life for the man and the boy, but I could have appreciated those things with chapter breaks, too. Then again, that’s just my preference, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain. Third, we are never told how the world came to be in this post-apocalyptic state; we are only told, through flashbacks, how the man’s wife killed herself, and through conversations between the man and the boy that friends who had previously been around were no longer so, having killed themselves to avoid the fate that was now the man and the boy’s. I’m not sure whether knowing what the cause was would add to or detract from the story, but that is something that can be speculated upon. I’d guess nuclear winter or something of the sort, but then, who really knows? I suppose that is it for my complaints… so now I’ll move on.
There are several passages I’d marked off for myself to come back to for reexamination, and I’d like to briefly discuss each of them here.
The first of these begins on page 23, and ends at the very top of page 24. Here we find the guys (what I’ll call the pair when speaking of them collectively) at a supermarket, where the father has found a can of Coke in a damaged machine and gives it to the boy, telling him it’s a treat for him when he is asked what it is. I think this scene may have spoken to me because I have a particular affinity for Coca-Cola, but other than that, it seems like such a sweet moment to me. It seems to be a moment when the father takes a bit of the world as it used to be, as he remembers it, and gives it to his son in giving him that can to drink. It attaches, somewhat, his son to a world that he never knew and was never a part of.
The second moment is a much simpler one, at the end of the only full paragraph on page 31: “Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember.” Though I’m not entirely certain as to why, this simple sentence touched me. It seems as if he’s desperate to hold onto his old world, to remember it, and reciting a list of things he loved is the only way to keep that world alive. This seems counter to what he’s told his son, though, or perhaps counter to what he’s thought or tried to convince himself of: that to hold onto memories like that is to taint them, to make them unreal, and therefore not true memories – fantasies that never existed. That plays in with a scene later in the first half of the novel, where he takes a picture of his wife that had been in his wallet, puts it into the road, and leaves it – he wants to keep the picture, but won’t let himself, seemingly because the perfect version of his wife that exists in that picture is not the wife that he wants to remember; he wants to remember her as she was, faults and all.
The third passage is on page 77, where he tells his boy of the aforementioned God-given duty. I’ve already discussed that aspect of it, but there’s something else to consider. Throughout the passage (and throughout the remainder of the novel, truth be told) the boy simply responds with “okay” a great deal of the time. Why? He’s mad at his father at times, I know, but why keep to just the one word? What does it signify? Or am I looking for meaning where there ultimately is none?
Finally, there’s a sentence that bridges pages 132 and 133: “Packets of seeds… He stuck them in his pocket. For what?” There’s not much that I have to say about this, except that I felt the need to answer the question, and did so by writing in the margins that he saved the seeds “because we all have an inherent hope for tomorrow.” I suppose what I meant by this was that he kept it just in case, as it were – just in case he was ever in a position to perform agricultural work (minimal as it would have been) again – or perhaps he wanted to leave his mark upon the road, to let others who were “carrying the fire” know that someone else had been here with the flame and moved on.
Anyway, that’s about it for now. I realize there’re the bunker scenes to talk about, too, but my thoughts on that are too incoherent at the moment to comment on them, though I look forward to discussing them in class.
[1] Bongiovi, Jon. “Bullet.” Lyrics. Perf. Bon Jovi. The Circle. Island/Mercury/Mercury Nashville, 2010.
