As I read The Road (I’m not quite to the finish) what seems most powerful to me is the style that McCarthy uses in creating the post-apocalyptic. The grayness of the text seems so vividly real, and depressive. Descriptions of ash, of the layers of worn and distressed clothing and blankets, of the rare pleasure of finding food, the frustration when that food is contaminated, are rendered in such a way that though the language is overwhelming drab, and dark, and dreary, it is an image quite easy to realize in the mind, and immediately something profoundly tragic.
I began to wonder, reading on the train the other day, sitting next to (quite appropriately) a father who appeared to be taking his young son home from school, why the novel felt so tragic. I began to think about a scene from further along in the first half, of the father washing the boy in freezing cold water, as the boy is covered in blood and gore. The father says, “This is my child… I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job,” (63). There is a recognizability to that scene that makes it familiar: it is an act of care, an action that seems to fit in what we might imagine to be appropriate to the parent-child relationship. Yet it has been altered to just enough to make it jarring—the action is preceded by a murder, the circumstances of which, causes of, and reasoning behind, it is not truly known, and the action is carried out in a brutal natural landscape, far from an the idealized site for such an action, in the warmth, and safety, of the home.
This is what makes this novel so interesting—the post-apocalyptic is unrecognizable, yet filled with elements of the familiar; or perhaps the opposite, that it is entirely recognizable, yet its constituent parts are of the other for our modern selves. We discussed the language of the novel in the last class session, and there, the familiar/unrecognizable divide is also unclear. Conventions of grammar have been abandoned, except where they havent. Of course, the language is entirely readable English, yet we find apostrophes gone missing and speakers rarely identified. The prose itself is stark: most of the sentences are quite short, few are complex sentences able to be broken into multiple clauses. They are direct. They give a singular meaning. And they describe something succintly, and disturbingly. A novel like this, so focused on only two characters, has gives these characters almost no interiority; and though the narrator appears omniscient, so much in this novel goes unknown, so much that the narrative voice must know, that is left unspoken.
A final, undeveloped, thought on this novel is that there must be a certain significance to the simple binary at work in the novel, that of good guys and bad guys. Not much else in this post-apocalyptic landscape seems to matter—notions of good and evil, human purpose in itself, has largely receded. But good guys remain, and the bad guys are still after them. Not only this, but they can be marked, they can be known. It would seem a relic from a pre-apocalyptic landscape to have this division, yet I suppose it is just one more of those disturbing on-the-fence moments of the familiar yet unrecognizable.
