Localizing the Apocalyptic

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I have been looking forward to The Road for some time not so much for the novel itself, I’ll confess, but so that after I read the book, I can watch the film, and then see all the local places I grew up around, with Viggo Mortensen pushing a cart and wielding a gun through them.  As a Pittsburgher, you are, in some sense, innately in touch with the apocalyptic, or perhaps post-apocalyptic.  Pittsburgh is a place where, between 1980 and 1984 alone, 50,000 steelworkers lost their jobs, as the economy hemorrhaged and the region seemed doomed.  Today, in most ways, the economy has recovered quite well, with the region as a whole experiencing an unemployment rate below the national average.  Yet feelings of impending doom are embedded in the Pittsburgh psyche, and much of this is due to the scars of decades of heavy industry followed by a total collapse of that.   Continue reading →

Life in a Post-Apocalyptic World

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The apocalypse that preludes the events of The Road begins with the end of linear time: “the clocks stopped at 1:17” (52). The end of time signals the end of stability, and the devolution of the world into an anarchic wasteland populated by cannibals and blood cults. In the relentlessly gray twilight world, “things believed to be true” (89), such as the existence of God and the different between good and evil, right and wrong, are thrown into question. Continue reading →

On The [Post-Apocalyptic] Road Again

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When the world we know is gone, what else is there to live for? This is a question that has been tirelessly touched upon in this class in relation to the other stories we’ve read/seen so far. For the other stories, there has always been a glimmer of hope for a better future, whether it is through women’s fertility, heavenly immortality, or even peace on Earth. For McCarthy’s The Road, I found myself troubled with the fact that I couldn’t initially find a clear reason for the man’s desperate want to survive. Continue reading →

Life, Death, & The Road in Between

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While reading The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, I found myself getting very emotionally attached to the storyline. Although I am not generally an unattached reader, I do find that my sympathy or feel for characters and plot structure varies among different works of literature. With this reading, I can say that I was impressed with my degree of commitment to McCarthy’s writing and the tale that he narrates. When forced to contemplate why this book strikes out to me, I can only resonate this particular interest with the overall theme of human survival.
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Survival

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After a slow start, I have become captivated by The Road. Though I didn’t like McCarthy’s writing style at first, it has grown on me, and I think it is especially powerful given the simple but heartbreaking conversations the father and son have, and is also effective in conveying the bleak landscape and the frightening encounters the two experience. Continue reading →

Where Do They Go From Here?

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While reading The Road at Starbucks, someone came up to me and said, “That book is so boring.” I had to disagree. He was referring to the stylistics and the (he argued) over-done portrayal of “the human condition.” I feel that McCarthy is successful in his use of language in portraying a very real image of a post-apocalyptic world. The monotony of the language, the short sentences, and the sense of greyness that pervades the novel convey a very believable empty, threatening, and decaying post-apocalyptic world. Continue reading →

Victim-Blaming and Perceived Victimization

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In one of the entries in his diary, Earl Turner writes, “How fragile a thing is man’s civilization! How superficial it is to his basic nature! And upon how few of the teeming multitudes whose lives it gives a pattern does it depend for its sustenance!” (86) This is just one of his many diatribes on how civilization in Americais decaying, destroyed from within by the cancer of liberalism and multiculturalism. His worldview fuels his belief that the Organization’s acts of terrorism and violence are justified; they are “forging the nucleus of a new society, a whole new civilization, which will rise from the ashes of the old” (111). It reminds me of the epigraph at the beginning of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. In fact, oddly enough, while reading The Turner Diaries, I often found myself recalling scenes from that movie. Continue reading →

A Manifesto for the Paranoid Mind

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In this class thus far, we have read and viewed some troubling things, but none on par with The Turner Diaries.  After reading some of it a few days back, I thought of that, and of course the reason, for myself at least, is the original-source nature of such a text (not sure if this is the correct terminology): this is not a text about anything, but rather was meant, to some people at least, to be a sort of manifesto.  In some cases, the Oklahoma City bombing notably, the manifesto was carried out.  Reading such a text as this can be quite disturbing, but ultimately, it teaches in a way a review, or other scholarly or journalistic work on a text cannot: it forces direct confrontation with such disturbing ideas, with no distance allowed, just the raw message, not distilled by a third party for easier consumption. Continue reading →