The Novel analysed by last years class Pages 29-49 "Where once he'd watched trout swaying in the current"- (page 30) References to time before (flashbacks) "Tomorrow came and went" (page 33) Telescoping through time. "Where he stood once with his own father in a winter long ago"-(page 34) References to a time before (flashbacks). Passage of the days: "In the evening" pg 92 "In the morning" pg 93 "Eternal blackness" pg 101 ‘In the night’ – p121 ‘it was almost light enough to see’ – 123 ‘Afternoon... evening...light draw down over the world’ – in one paragraph p131 ‘He was gone longer than he’d meant to be’ – gives an indication of time flying p130 Markers in the year: "It could be November" pg 93 Telescoped time: "In the evening... tomorrow... dark of night" pg 92 - all in one paragraph "They might have covered three miles" pg 107 "They'd had no food and little sleep in five days" pg 111 Time expands: ‘nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good’ – p130Abstract references ‘When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time.’ – p120 ‘Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing from their sleep’ – p122Other ‘He would have ample time later to think about that’ – shows there are no deadlines/rushing p113 ‘No time to look’ – contrasts to above quote, shows how we perceive time differs depending on our situation p117 ‘stopping to rest each fifty counted steps’ – shows a new way of making references to time; whereas we might say every 5 minutes, the man uses steps as an indication of passing time p123 Pages 155-175 'They spent the day eating and sleeping' (Page 164) - Telescoping through time 'Impossible to tell what time of the day he was looking at' (Page 164) - Abstract reference to time 'The day was brief, hardly a day at all' (Page 164) - Telescoping through time.'They followed him for a while' (Page 171) - Expanding time Suspended time: "The snow fell nor did it cease to fall" pg 101 Other: "In time to wink out forever" pg 93 "It takes a long time" pg 106 "In the early dawn at latest. Running the road in the night" pg 108 "We probably don't have much time" pg 109 ‘When did you eat last?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You don’t remember.’ This shows the reader that there is no reason for people on the road to remember when they have eaten as they have no reason to plan meals. We only plan meals today because our day follows a set routine and we eat to keep up with this. On the road however, day and night have almost become one due to the ash and dust that falls, blocking out the sun. They have no concept of time and no reason for it so all they can really distinguish between is day and night so it is easy to imagine how a person could lose track of the days as they are all the same; as long as they are alive, they have no reason to remember when or what they eat. ‘How old are you?’ Similarly to the food, the old man is unable to truthfully recall his age as there is no reason for him to know it and no reminder of the date. Time and day are hypothetical things created by humans to gain a routine in life. However, mankind is dying out and everybody lives in the moment and has no cause to plan ahead, unless people meticulously count each day then it would be impossible to tell precisely when a year has passed and even if someone did work it out, what would be the point? It’s hardly like they’re going to celebrate. McCarthy uses the old man as an example to show that in the novel, the reader can never be certain as to how much time has passed, as the characters have no idea either. ‘How long have you been on the road?’ ‘I’ve always been on the road.’ Once again, in this section, McCarthy uses the dialogue between two characters to make the reader question the necessity of time; the fact that the man can’t actually remember how long he has been on the road for suggests that time is insignificant. The way that the man says he has always been on the road would suggest that time is standing still for these people. McCarthy handles time simply by putting a halt to it to show that it is just another thing on the road which is dying. ‘People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.’ This quote is suggesting that for all the care we take over time, it doesn’t care about us. It is telling the reader that all the worry we have over keeping to a schedule is ridiculous because time is a made up thing and isn’t going to alter itself to suit us. All the people who worried and invested plans in the future, ironically, weren’t actually as prepared for the next day as they could have been where as those who take each day as it comes are surviving still as they had no expectations and don’t need time to rule their lives. ‘In the morning the stood in the road’ McCarthy gives the reader absolutely no idea what time in the morning they are talking about to once again highlight the lack of importance time holds for people on the road. All they have to go by is the road; they walk along it when it is light enough and sleep when it isn’t, to them it is completely irrelevant what time it is as they have no goals in life other than to get to the sea as quickly as possible with no real aim when they get there, meaning that they can take as long as they need to. ‘In the early afternoon’McCarthy uses slightly more detail in this section. This could be because this is the first time phrase used since they left the old man alone in the road so the man and they boy are paying more attention to time as they are feeling guilty, wondering where the old man is and how long he has been left on his own for. ‘In the night he woke in the cold dark’ McCarthy uses this phrase to lead onto ‘coughing and he coughed till his chest was raw’ to fit in with the image that cold dark night quite often symbolise death, something that we know is imminent for the man but the way the author associates it with time suggests that his time is running out quickly. ‘You said it would last a few weeks’ ‘I know.’ ‘But it’s just been a few days.’ This back up the previous quote in suggesting that time is speeding up and things are going a lot quicker than the man and the boy expected them to. ‘He’d slept little in weeks.’ This shows McCarthy skipping through time to move the novel on but also showing the rapid declination of the man’s health, he gets several weeks worse in the few seconds it takes the reader to read it, to emphasize the pint. Pages 197-217 References to the passage of the day: 'Early the day following' Markers in the year: 'Three days. Four.' Passages in which narrative time is telescoped: 'The following day' Points at which narrative time expands: P.g. 197- 'When three men stepped from behind a truck'- time expands because there is suddenly a lot more detail than the narrator usually gives; this is because it's a tense, potentially dangerous situation but also could be because it's a break from their monotonous daily lives, so every moment is taken in. References to before: P.g. 199- The man dreams of the past in which he visited a half destoyed library. Points at which time is suspended: During the mans dreams on p.g. 199. Abstract references to time: 'They had not gone far'- The novel's characters use distance instead of time as a way to measure their progress, since time is now meaningless but their journey is vital to their survival. Handling of time pg 218-238 Page 226: 'They stayed in the house for four days eating and sleeping'. Time is contracted into a short paragraph. Page 229: 'Long days.' Time has suddenly moved on, we cannot tell whether it is days or weeks. Page 230: 'An hour later...' Chronological order. Page 233: 'With dark they built a fire.' Shows the turning of day to night. Page 235: 'In the morning...' Chronological order. Page 219-224: Several pages devoted to a short time, less than half an hour. Every little detail is told. Page 228-229: Time goes very fast, one second they are at the abandoned house and in the next paragraph they are standing in a supermarket. Then it skips to 'Long days' and we cannot tell whether is has been days or weeks or months. Page 234: Flashback, 'he remembered walking once on such a night...' he is comparing his old beach memories to his experiences on the beach now. He is remembering a better time. This is significant because flashbacks occur throughout the novel as a running theme. Time- Pages 260-280 References to the passage of Time... 1) "He fixed dinner" could suggest evening time p. 261 2) "He loaded the flarepistol and as soon as it was dark" p.262 3) "In the morning" p.263 4) "He held him all night" p.265 5) "In the evening he opened a can of soup" p. 266 6) "...the fire had died down almost to ash and it was a black night" p.266 7) "The boy slept all day" p.267 8) "He tried to stay awake all night" p.267 9) "It rained briefly in the night" p. 268 10) "When he woke again" "Grey daylight" p.268 11) "In two days time" p.270 12) "They went on. It was already late in the day and it wa another hour and deep into the long dusk" P. 273 13) " ...stood there in the cold and gathering dark" p. 278 14) "In the morning" p.279 15) "he woke that night" p.279 16) "In three days" p.280 Markers in the year... 1) "The wintery dawn was coming" p. 266- This suggests that the months are later in the year. We depend on hints like the weather and how McCarthy describes the sceneary to establish/ estimate what time of the year it is. 2) "The earth itself contracting with the cold" p.279 This tells us that it is winter time or maybe the Earths condidtion is just becoming even worse so it is getting colder. Either suggestion could tell us that the novel has moved to the winter months of the year. 3) "What time of year?" p.279 This contradicts the hints of what time of year it is, because the man and the boy do not even know, so it is impossible to be certain what time of year it is. Narrative time is telescoped... 1) "In three days they came to a small port town"- This passage of time has no mention of what may have happened within those three days,which creates confusion as the reader wonders why this passage of time has gone quicker than others as McCarthy often describes the days/nights events. 2) "In two days' time they were walking the beach as far as the headland and back"- Again time has passed quickly as we do not get any description of what has happened within those two days. Points at which Narrative time expands... The shooting of the Road Rat and the stealing of their possessions is an example of Narrative time expanding. This is too build up the tension of what The man will do to him. Also the narrative time could be expanded to show the true character of The man, and how The boy reacts to his fathers actions. The event goes for seven pages. McCarthy may have done this to show the raw emotions of the boy and how his fathers action have shaped and changed his view of him. Points at which time seems to be suspended... When The boy and The man are looking for their stolen cart, time seems to be suspended "They went on. It was already late in the day and it was another hour into the long dusk" the words "Another" and "long" create a sense of time going slowly. This creates tension as the reader wonders if they will find their cart as time seems to be running out for them before it starts to get dark. McCarthy suspends time here to build up tension, "They went on." makes it seem like they have been searching of their cart for a long time. This suspends time because we as the readers want them to get their belongings back, but it appears to be taking a while to find the thief so we start to doubt id they will find it. When the boy becomes ill, time seems susupended. ""You have to stay near, he said. You have to be quick. So you can be with him. Hold him close. Last day of the earth" Time appears to be suspended becasue the we can sense that the man is worried for the boy, and it seems like he is getting worse so time has slowed down and is hanging on to this tense moment. The mans speech also creates suspended time as it appears like he is trying to prepare himself for the worst, which creates more tension. Pages 302-307 Reference to before-'Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains' page 306 Time seems to be suspended and more abstract view of time- 'On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming' page 307 Time is telescoped 'He cried for a long time' page 306 Time seems suspended 'You could see them standing in

The Novel analysed by last years class

Pages 29-49

"Where once he'd watched trout swaying in the current"- (page 30) References to time before (flashbacks)
"Tomorrow came and went" (page 33) Telescoping through time.
"Where he stood once with his own father in a winter long ago"-(page 34) References to a time before (flashbacks).

 

Passage of the days:

"In the evening" pg 92
"In the morning" pg 93
"Eternal blackness" pg 101

‘In the night’ – p121
‘it was almost light enough to see’ – 123
‘Afternoon... evening...light draw down over the world’ – in one paragraph p131
‘He was gone longer than he’d meant to be’ – gives an indication of time flying p130

 

Markers in the year:

"It could be November" pg 93

 

Telescoped time:

"In the evening... tomorrow... dark of night" pg 92 - all in one paragraph
"They might have covered three miles" pg 107
"They'd had no food and little sleep in five days" pg 111

Time expands:

‘nothing in his memory anywhere of anything so good’ – p130Abstract references
‘When the time comes? When the time comes there will be no time. Now is the time.’ – p120
‘Phantoms not heard from in a thousand years rousing from their sleep’ – p122Other
‘He would have ample time later to think about that’ – shows there are no deadlines/rushing p113
‘No time to look’ – contrasts to above quote, shows how we perceive time differs depending on our situation p117

‘stopping to rest each fifty counted steps’ – shows a new way of making references to time; whereas we might say every 5 minutes, the man uses steps as an indication of passing time p123
Pages 155-175
'They spent the day eating and sleeping' (Page 164) - Telescoping through time
'Impossible to tell what time of the day he was looking at' (Page 164) - Abstract reference to time
'The day was brief, hardly a day at all' (Page 164) - Telescoping through time.
'They followed him for a while' (Page 171) - Expanding time

Suspended time:

"The snow fell nor did it cease to fall" pg 101

Other:
"In time to wink out forever" pg 93
"It takes a long time" pg 106
"In the early dawn at latest. Running the road in the night" pg 108
"We probably don't have much time" pg 109


‘When did you eat last?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You don’t remember.’
This shows the reader that there is no reason for people on the road to remember when they have eaten as they have no reason to plan meals. We only plan meals today because our day follows a set routine and we eat to keep up with this. On the road however, day and night have almost become one due to the ash and dust that falls, blocking out the sun. They have no concept of time and no reason for it so all they can really distinguish between is day and night so it is easy to imagine how a person could lose track of the days as they are all the same; as long as they are alive, they have no reason to remember when or what they eat.

‘How old are you?’
Similarly to the food, the old man is unable to truthfully recall his age as there is no reason for him to know it and no reminder of the date. Time and day are hypothetical things created by humans to gain a routine in life. However, mankind is dying out and everybody lives in the moment and has no cause to plan ahead, unless people meticulously count each day then it would be impossible to tell precisely when a year has passed and even if someone did work it out, what would be the point? It’s hardly like they’re going to celebrate. McCarthy uses the old man as an example to show that in the novel, the reader can never be certain as to how much time has passed, as the characters have no idea either.

‘How long have you been on the road?’ ‘I’ve always been on the road.’
Once again, in this section, McCarthy uses the dialogue between two characters to make the reader question the necessity of time; the fact that the man can’t actually remember how long he has been on the road for suggests that time is insignificant. The way that the man says he has always been on the road would suggest that time is standing still for these people. McCarthy handles time simply by putting a halt to it to show that it is just another thing on the road which is dying.

‘People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.’
This quote is suggesting that for all the care we take over time, it doesn’t care about us. It is telling the reader that all the worry we have over keeping to a schedule is ridiculous because time is a made up thing and isn’t going to alter itself to suit us. All the people who worried and invested plans in the future, ironically, weren’t actually as prepared for the next day as they could have been where as those who take each day as it comes are surviving still as they had no expectations and don’t need time to rule their lives.

‘In the morning the stood in the road’
McCarthy gives the reader absolutely no idea what time in the morning they are talking about to once again highlight the lack of importance time holds for people on the road. All they have to go by is the road; they walk along it when it is light enough and sleep when it isn’t, to them it is completely irrelevant what time it is as they have no goals in life other than to get to the sea as quickly as possible with no real aim when they get there, meaning that they can take as long as they need to.
‘In the early afternoon’McCarthy uses slightly more detail in this section. This could be because this is the first time phrase used since they left the old man alone in the road so the man and they boy are paying more attention to time as they are feeling guilty, wondering where the old man is and how long he has been left on his own for.

‘In the night he woke in the cold dark’
McCarthy uses this phrase to lead onto ‘coughing and he coughed till his chest was raw’ to fit in with the image that cold dark night quite often symbolise death, something that we know is imminent for the man but the way the author associates it with time suggests that his time is running out quickly.

‘You said it would last a few weeks’ ‘I know.’ ‘But it’s just been a few days.’
This back up the previous quote in suggesting that time is speeding up and things are going a lot quicker than the man and the boy expected them to.

‘He’d slept little in weeks.’
This shows McCarthy skipping through time to move the novel on but also showing the rapid declination of the man’s health, he gets several weeks worse in the few seconds it takes the reader to read it, to emphasize the pint.

Pages 197-217
References to the passage of the day:
'Early the day following'

Markers in the year:
'Three days. Four.'

Passages in which narrative time is telescoped:
'The following day'

Points at which narrative time expands:
P.g. 197- 'When three men stepped from behind a truck'- time expands because there is suddenly a lot more detail than the narrator usually gives; this is because it's a tense, potentially dangerous situation but also could be because it's a break from their monotonous daily lives, so every moment is taken in.

References to before:
P.g. 199- The man dreams of the past in which he visited a half destoyed library.

Points at which time is suspended:
During the mans dreams on p.g. 199.

Abstract references to time:
'They had not gone far'- The novel's characters use distance instead of time as a way to measure their progress, since time is now meaningless but their journey is vital to their survival.

Handling of time pg 218-238
Page 226: 'They stayed in the house for four days eating and sleeping'. Time is contracted into a short paragraph.

Page 229: 'Long days.' Time has suddenly moved on, we cannot tell whether it is days or weeks.

Page 230: 'An hour later...' Chronological order.

Page 233: 'With dark they built a fire.' Shows the turning of day to night.

Page 235: 'In the morning...' Chronological order.

Page 219-224: Several pages devoted to a short time, less than half an hour. Every little detail is told.

Page 228-229: Time goes very fast, one second they are at the abandoned house and in the next paragraph they are standing in a supermarket. Then it skips to 'Long days' and we cannot tell whether is has been days or weeks or months.

Page 234: Flashback, 'he remembered walking once on such a night...' he is comparing his old beach memories to his experiences on the beach now. He is remembering a better time. This is significant because flashbacks occur throughout the novel as a running theme.

Time- Pages 260-280

References to the passage of Time...

1) "He fixed dinner" could suggest evening time p. 261
2) "He loaded the flarepistol and as soon as it was dark" p.262
3) "In the morning" p.263
4) "He held him all night" p.265
5) "In the evening he opened a can of soup" p. 266
6) "...the fire had died down almost to ash and it was a black night" p.266
7) "The boy slept all day" p.267
8) "He tried to stay awake all night" p.267
9) "It rained briefly in the night" p. 268
10) "When he woke again" "Grey daylight" p.268
11) "In two days time" p.270
12) "They went on. It was already late in the day and it wa another hour and deep into the long dusk" P. 273
13) " ...stood there in the cold and gathering dark" p. 278
14) "In the morning" p.279
15) "he woke that night" p.279
16) "In three days" p.280

Markers in the year...

1) "The wintery dawn was coming" p. 266- This suggests that the months are later in the year. We depend on hints like the weather and how McCarthy describes the sceneary to establish/ estimate what time of the year it is.

2) "The earth itself contracting with the cold" p.279 This tells us that it is winter time or maybe the Earths condidtion is just becoming even worse so it is getting colder. Either suggestion could tell us that the novel has moved to the winter months of the year.

3) "What time of year?" p.279 This contradicts the hints of what time of year it is, because the man and the boy do not even know, so it is impossible to be certain what time of year it is.

Narrative time is telescoped...

1) "In three days they came to a small port town"- This passage of time has no mention of what may have happened within those three days,which creates confusion as the reader wonders why this passage of time has gone quicker than others as McCarthy often describes the days/nights events.

2) "In two days' time they were walking the beach as far as the headland and back"- Again time has passed quickly as we do not get any description of what has happened within those two days.

Points at which Narrative time expands...

The shooting of the Road Rat and the stealing of their possessions is an example of Narrative time expanding. This is too build up the tension of what The man will do to him. Also the narrative time could be expanded to show the true character of The man, and how The boy reacts to his fathers actions. The event goes for seven pages. McCarthy may have done this to show the raw emotions of the boy and how his fathers action have shaped and changed his view of him.

Points at which time seems to be suspended...

When The boy and The man are looking for their stolen cart, time seems to be suspended "They went on. It was already late in the day and it was another hour into the long dusk" the words "Another" and "long" create a sense of time going slowly. This creates tension as the reader wonders if they will find their cart as time seems to be running out for them before it starts to get dark. McCarthy suspends time here to build up tension, "They went on." makes it seem like they have been searching of their cart for a long time. This suspends time because we as the readers want them to get their belongings back, but it appears to be taking a while to find the thief so we start to doubt id they will find it.

When the boy becomes ill, time seems susupended. ""You have to stay near, he said. You have to be quick. So you can be with him. Hold him close. Last day of the earth" Time appears to be suspended becasue the we can sense that the man is worried for the boy, and it seems like he is getting worse so time has slowed down and is hanging on to this tense moment. The mans speech also creates suspended time as it appears like he is trying to prepare himself for the worst, which creates more tension.
Pages 302-307

Reference to before-'Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains' page 306
Time seems to be suspended and more abstract view of time- 'On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming' page 307
Time is telescoped 'He cried for a long time' page 306
Time seems suspended 'You could see them standing in

Symbols & Metaphors

Water, Cleaning and Washing

• Cleanliness, washing away the worlds horrors, water could link to the boy being baptizied, drowning,
• Takes place a few times and these are when the father cleans the boy, the last time is in the bunker as this is the last time that they are safe.

The Sea

• Hope, saftey, food, water, blue, grey, dead fish,
• Throughout the book the sea is the place where man and boy are trying to get to when they get there they are dissapointed as the sea is just like everything else in the world.

The Colour Grey (Gray)

• Surroundings, everything, mirrors the value of people in the world, everything is grey other than the fathers memorys e.g. the memory of him and his wife in the theatre as the place is described as golden.

Ash

• Constant, covers everything, reminder of death

could be the ash of people for all things when burnt turn to ash, giving the lives of the boy and man trudging through human ash a bit more of an omnious feel.

Fire

• Heat, burn, destruction, death, hope, spirit, the two characters "carry the fire" but that is never truly defined as to what it is, could it be hope, strength, being a good guy? or could it really be something more sinister, like a weapon or chip embeded in them which could cause more distruction?
  
• Sight/sightlessness
  - the future, looking over the see there is nothing to be seen other than skeletons on the beach and a crashed boat, when the father shoots a flare into the sky they can see nothing, this is the point where the two realise there is no help, no sympathy in the world other than theirs.

Seeds

• Music/musical instruments - showing that there is still some beauty in the world, the father makes the boy an instument which he later throws away, music is shown to be the same as inocence, the boy becomes an adult thus losing that inocence and nolonger needing the music
• Rebirth, food, hope, the seeds being eaten by the man and boy are symbolic of nations taking things before they are ready, that things are not given time to establish and so are destroyed. they could also symbolise the fact that potential is still in the earth to reawaken from this death or sleep.

Animal Imagery

Imaginary, skeltons are found but nowhere in the book are there animals shown, they could either all be dead or in some other far off country, the boy however constantly wonders where any animals are.


Religious Imagery 

Hope for the father and son, anti-prophet Ely, the boy calls himself "the one" and his father asks Ely if he would believe that his son was a god.
The Coca Cola Can

How things used to be, the sweet in a sour world a very important symbol of american culture, a symbol of national unity in the second world war and the spirit of america in the present times.

Why did Cormac McCarthy write The Road in the style he did?

Cormac McCarthy

PERSONAL LIFE
Cormac McCarthy was born in Providence in 1933, Rhode Island and was one of six children within the family. McCarthy studied at the University of Tennessee from 1951-52 and 1957-59 but never graduated from his course.

After marrying a fellow student on his course Lee Holleman in 1961, he and she 'moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside Knoxville' They had a son, Cullen, in 1962. This son would become influential throughout The Road.

INTERVIEWS WITH McCARTHY

In one of his few interviews with The New York Times,McCarthy reveals that he is 'not a fan of authors who do not deal with issues of life and death'. He continued to say 'To me that is not literature . A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange'.

In 2006, McCarthy made his first appearance on television with an interview with Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Winfrey Show.  During the interview he related several stories illustrating the degree of outright poverty he endured at times during his career as a writer. He also spoke about the experience of fathering a child at an advanced age, and how his now-eight-year-old son was the inspiration for The Road. McCarthy told Oprah that he prefers "simple declarative sentences" and that he uses capital letters, periods, an occasional comma, a colon for setting off a list, but "never a semicolon." He does not use quotation marks for dialogue and believes there is no reason to "blot the page up with weird little marks."

FAMILY
Children

• Cullen McCarthy (Model for The Road)
• John Francis McCarthy

Marriages

• Lee Holleman (1961) Divorced
• Annie De Lisle (1967 Divorced 1981)
• Jennifer Winkley (2007 -

Novels

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Dark (1968)
• Child of God (1973)
• Suttree (1979)
• Blood Meridian of the Evening Redness in the West (1985)
• All the Pretty Horses (1992)
  1st Part in trilogy
• The Crossing (1994)
  2nd part in trilogy
• Cities of the Plain (1998)
  3rd part in trilogy
• No Country for Old Men (2005)
• The Road (2006)
• The Passenger (forthcoming)

Short Fiction

• Wake for Susan (1959)
• A Drowning Incident (1960)

Screen Plays

• The Gardener's Son (1976)
• The Counsellor (2013)

WHY WOULD THIS HELP ME?
Looking back on McCarthy's life, we can view which moments in his life helped to shape The Road; his son was the model for The Boy in The Road; the lack of punctuation comes from his son who stated there is 'no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks.'

• According to Mr Smith, the contextual evidence of McCarthy IS ASSESSED IN QUESTION 1B,

The Road Review - The Guardian, Alan Warner

Review by Alan Warner

Shorn of history and context, Cormac McCarthy's other nine novels could be cast as rungs, with The Road as a pinnacle. This is a very great novel, but one that needs a context in both the past and in so-called post-9/11 America.

We can divide the contemporary American novel into two traditions, or two social classes. The Tough Guy tradition comes up from Fenimore Cooper, with a touch of Poe, through Melville, Faulkner and Hemingway. The Savant tradition comes from Hawthorne, especially through Henry James, Edith Wharton and Scott Fitzgerald. You could argue that the latter is liberal, east coast/New York, while the Tough Guys are gothic, reactionary, nihilistic, openly religious, southern or fundamentally rural.
The Savants' blood line (curiously unrepresentative of Americans generally) has gained undoubted ascendancy in the literary firmament of the US. Upper middle class, urban and cosmopolitan, they or their own species review themselves. The current Tough Guys are a murder of great, hopelessly masculine, undomesticated writers, whose critical reputations have been and still are today cruelly divergent, adrift and largely unrewarded compared to the contemporary Savant school. In literature as in American life, success must be total and contrasted "failure" fatally dispiriting.
But in both content and technical riches, the Tough Guys are the true legislators of tortured American souls. They could include novelists Thomas McGuane, William Gaddis, Barry Hannah, Leon Rooke, Harry Crews, Jim Harrison, Mark Richard, James Welch and Denis Johnson. Cormac McCarthy is granddaddy to them all. New York critics may prefer their perfidy to be ignored, comforting themselves with the superlatives for All the Pretty Horses, but we should remember that the history of Cormac McCarthy and his achievement is not an American dream but near on 30 years of neglect for a writer who, since The Orchard Keeper in 1965, produced only masterworks in elegant succession. Now he has given us his great American nightmare.The Road is a novel of transforming power and formal risk. Abandoning gruff but profound male camaraderie, McCarthy instead sounds the limits of imaginable love and despair between a diligent father and his timid young son, "each other's world entire". The initial experience of the novel is sobering and oppressive, its final effect is emotionally shattering.
America - and presumably the world - has suffered an apocalypse the nature of which is unclear and, faced with such loss, irrelevant. The centre of the world is sickened. Earthquakes shunt, fire storms smear a "cauterised terrain", the ash-filled air requires slipshod veils to cover the mouth. Nature revolts. The ruined world is long plundered, with canned food and good shoes the ultimate aspiration. Almost all have plunged into complete Conradian savagery: murdering convoys of road agents, marauders and "bloodcults" plunder these wastes. Most have resorted to cannibalism. One passing brigade is fearfully glimpsed: "Bearded, their breath smoking through their masks. The phalanx following carried spears or lances ... and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each." Despite this soul desert, the end of God and ethics, the father still defines and endangers himself by trying to instil moral values in his son, by refusing to abandon all belief.

All of this is utterly convincing and physically chilling. The father is coughing blood, which forces him and his son, "in their rags like mendicant friars sent forth to find their keep", on to the treacherous road southward, towards a sea and - possibly - survivable, milder winters. They push their salvage in a shopping cart, wryly fitted with a motorcycle mirror to keep sentinel over that road behind. The father has a pistol, with two bullets only. He faces the nadir of human and parental existence; his wife, the boy's mother, has already committed suicide. If caught, the multifarious reavers will obviously rape his son, then slaughter and eat them both. He plans to shoot his son - though he questions his ability to do so - if they are caught. Occasionally, between nightmares, the father seeks refuge in dangerously needy and exquisite recollections of our lost world.
They move south through nuclear grey winter, "like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world", sleeping badly beneath filthy tarpaulin, setting hidden campfires, exploring ruined houses, scavenging shrivelled apples. We feel and pity their starving dereliction as, despite the profound challenge to the imaginative contemporary novelist, McCarthy completely achieves this physical and metaphysical hell for us. "The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colours. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true."

Such a scenario allows McCarthy finally to foreground only the very basics of physical human survival and the intimate evocation of a destroyed landscape drawn with such precision and beauty. He makes us ache with nostalgia for restored normality. The Road also encapsulates the usual cold violence, the biblical tincture of male masochism, of wounds and rites of passage. His central character can adopt a universal belligerence and misanthropy. In this damnation, rightly so, everyone, finally, is the enemy. He tells his son: "My job is to take care of you. I was appointed by God to do that ... We are the good guys." The other uncomfortable, tellingly national moment comes when the father salvages perhaps the last can of Coke in the world. This is truly an American apocalypse.

The vulnerable cultural references for this daring scenario obviously come from science fiction. But what propels The Road far beyond its progenitors are the diverted poetic heights of McCarthy's late-English prose; the simple declamation and plainsong of his rendered dialect, as perfect as early Hemingway; and the adamantine surety and utter aptness of every chiselled description. As has been said before, McCarthy is worthy of his biblical themes, and with some deeply nuanced paragraphs retriggering verbs and nouns that are surprising and delightful to the ear, Shakespeare is evoked. The way McCarthy sails close to the prose of late Beckett is also remarkable; the novel proceeds in Beckett-like, varied paragraphs. They are unlikely relatives, these two artists in old age, cornered by bleak experience and the rich limits of an English pulverised down through despair to a pleasingly wry perfection. "He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms out-held for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle."

Set piece after set piece, you will read on, absolutely convinced, thrilled, mesmerised with disgust and the fascinating novelty of it all: breathtakingly lucky escapes; a complete train, abandoned and alone on an embankment; a sudden liberating, joyous discovery or a cellar of incarcerated amputees being slowly eaten. And everywhere the mummified dead, "shrivelled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth".

All the modern novel can do is done here. After the great historical fictions of the American west, Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy, The Road is no artistic pinnacle for McCarthy but instead a masterly reclamation of those midnight-black, gothic worlds of Outer Dark (1968) and the similarly terrifying but beautiful Child of God (1973). How will this vital novel be positioned in today's America by Savants, Tough Guys or worse? Could its nightmare vistas reinforce those in the US who are determined to manipulate its people into believing that terror came into being only in 2001? This text, in its fragility, exists uneasily within such ill times. It's perverse that the scorched earth which The Road depicts often brings to mind those real apocalypses of southern Iraq beneath black oil smoke, or New Orleans - vistas not unconnected with the contemporary American regime.

One night, when the father thinks that he and his son will starve to death, he weeps, not about the obvious but about beauty and goodness, "things he'd no longer any way to think about". Camus wrote that the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely. The Road affirms belief in the tender pricelessness of the here and now. In creating an exquisite nightmare, it does not add to the cruelty and ugliness of our times; it warns us now how much we have to lose. It makes the novels of the contemporary Savants seem infantile and horribly over-rated. Beauty and goodness are here aplenty and we should think about them. While we can.http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/04/featuresreviews.guardianreview4 

Character Analysis 3 - Ely

Character Analysis - Ely

Let's start out by confusing you. This character isn't really named Ely; that's just the name he gives to The Man. Later he admits it's not his name at all. But since we never find out what his real name is, we're going to call him Ely anyway.

In a book full of nameless characters, Ely stands out. He shares his name with a biblical prophet (Eli) from the Book of Samuel. And he certainly looks and acts part: he's old (how is he still alive?) and hobbles down the road. He speaks in riddles. Some of what he says seems wise and some of it seems a little crazy.

Ely fits in nicely with McCarthy's Revelations-inspired setting (the Book of Revelation is the part of the Bible that tells of the apocalypse). But Ely doesn't say things you might expect a prophet to say. Don't these bearded old men usually proclaim God's anger and the waywardness of men? Not Ely. He proclaims God's nonexistence and says that Death will eventually disappear along with all human life. He's an anti-prophet, really.

It's worth comparing some of Ely's statements with some of The Man's thoughts. Is Ely a real prophet compared to The Man? Or does The Man actually have a bit of the prophecy in him as well? We're not sure – both characters say slightly goofy things, but then they blow your mind in the next sentence. We guess that's how prophecy works.

It's also worth noting that through Ely, we see The Boy's kindness and generosity. The Boy lavishes their supplies on the old man, who isn't even grateful. The Man however, is not so generous to Ely. This maybe down the the fact that if he joins him and The Boy, it could put their survival chances at risk as it leaves them more vulnerable than they were without him being their. An extra mouth also puts a higher demand on the collection of food for the characters; although it doesnt seem a big difference, even one extra mouth to feed when the food rations are at a minimum could result in The Man being too weak to care for The Boy. There is also a risk of the unknown. Ely is an unknown and mysterious character for the reader as he 'keeps his cards close to his chest' and doesnt give much information about his history away; this unknown history could be a danger for The Man and The Boy as they make there way south.

Character Analysis 2 - The Man

Character Analysis - The Man
For all his skill with flare guns and tracking, The Man is really a big softie. Think of a mean biker dude with "Mom" tattooed on his bicep. Think of a skilled medieval crossbowman who likes to write love poems on the side. Think of a cattle rancher who likes to grow rose bushes. Really, think of any tough person with a sensitive side. Of course, The Man is more complicated than these caricatures – but they're a good place to start.

One of the first things we notice about The Man is his devotion to The Boy. "When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out and touch the child sleeping beside him" . The Man identifies his son as his "warrant" – which means the child provides him with a reason to live. The rest of the novel bears this out. The Man's thoughts always return to The Boy. Everything The Man does seems to be done out of consideration for The Boy – to educate him, feed him, keep him safe, protect him, or keep him warm.

The Man is utterly devoted to his son. The isolation of these two characters – the post-apocalyptic setting helps, of course – creates a special bond between parent and child. It allows for a profound closeness. And The Man's love for his son takes on a heroic quality; who else in the novel cares for anyone this way? The Man's virtues of kindness and selflessness, given the setting, become superhuman feats.

The Man's devotion to his son doesn't diminish his toughness; if anything, it only makes him fiercer. Another constant of the novel is The Man's bravery and skill. He rigs stoves, shopping carts, and torches. He carves and colours imitation bullets for their pistol. He even sews up his own wound! If pushed, he's ruthlessly violent. When one of the "bad guys" threatens The Boy with a knife, The Man responds like Jason Bourne (Other fictional, crazy, gun obssessed men are also available)

The man had already dropped to the ground and he swung with him and levelled the pistol and fired from a two-handed position balanced on both knees at a distance of six feet. The man [the "bad guy", reference to the start of page 81 "We will always be the good guys"] fell back instantly and lay with blood bubbling from the hole in his forehead.

This guy doesn't mess around – this is action hero stuff. McCarthy counterbalances The Man's devotion to his son with a ruthless streak. He sets a "bad guy" on fire with his flare gun and leaves a thief in the middle of the road without any clothes. It's ambiguous, however, whether McCarthy wants us to judge The Man's ruthlessness or praise it. Is it an expression of his devotion for The Boy and concern for his safety? Or does The Man become too much like the people he's trying to protect The Boy from?

You have to wonder how much the apocalypse and his wife's suicide have damaged The Man. He often seems burdened by the past: not only the loss of his wife, but knowing (unlike The Boy) another life before the disaster. The Boy doesn't seem burdened in the same way. He is more open and generous to those they meet on the road. There's a passage late in the novel when The Boy points out to The Man that he has to make sure they remain good and kind amidst all the world's collapse. When The Man says to The Boy, "You're not the one who has to worry about everything," The Boy responds, "Yes I am [...]. I am the one". Meaning, The Boy has to make sure they make ethical choices; this linking back to the symbolism of The Boy confirms that The Boy attempts to maintain civilisation when the world is almost in a state of anarchy.