The Road by Cormac McCarthy
( 2006) 241 pages

“He turned and looked at the boy. Standing with his suitcase like an orphan waiting for a bus.”
-Cormac McCarthy

The Road is an emotional story about a father and son who trek across a post-apocalyptic America. After a catastrophic ecological disaster that covers the world in ash and kills innumerable people, “the man” and “the boy” are forced to go South in order to escape the freezing winter. It follows their daily life walking along the road with their shopping cart – scavenging abandoned houses, making campfires, crafting makeshift snowshoes, and suffering in hunger and precarity of the next day. They encounter other people, but the majority are hostile and will do anything for food. This book highlights the dread of a hopeless, unforgiving landscape, and how humanity can degrade. However, the father and son display everything except inhumanity and a loss of hope. The unconditional paternal love and everlasting hope are truly heartwarming in the cold-blooded world.

The first most thing to address is the style of writing. It is straight to the point while being very nuanced. The characters’ actions and the environment are always being described to the minute details. The sentences are short and the dialogue is unsophisticated; It does not follow conventional punctuation and writing. Additionally, there are no chapters – it is a continuous story (there are small breaks every few pages, however). These may be stylistic choices to give the reader a constant reminder of the washed-out world or to give the reader a sense of time. The no-chapter style allows me to wake up with the characters every day knowing that they only have materials they did from yesterday and won’t magically have a full supply of food or miraculously arrive at their destination.

I would rate The Road a 4.5 out of 5 stars. The deep emotions and themes of persistence conveyed and the message about the environment are beautifully exuded by McCarthy.

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