Commentary on Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road'
The Road is a novel written by American writer Cormac McCarthy, that describes the journey of an unnamed father and his son along a vacant road. It is set in a post apocalyptic world, where all civilization and landscape has been destroyed due to a unexplained cataclysm. However, the constant remainder between the father and the son that they are the ‘good guys’ that ‘carry the fire’ is a testament to McCarthy’s faith and hope in humanity among the present’s fears: terrorism, epidemia, genocide and weapons of mass destruction.
McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world is vividly portrayed by his repetitive use of adjectives and nouns with very dull connotations in very simple sentences. Words such as dark, night, cold and grey, can be seen throughout the novel as a reminder to the readers to visualize a world practically dominated by these colours; no brightness, joy, warmth. But pure death. In the first few pages, McCarthy’s develops this dark atmosphere which he is able to portray until the end. His descriptions kept reminding me of Pablo Picasso’s painting ‘Guernica’; work he finalized in 1937 as a response to the German bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica. As one can see from the picture, Picasso’s painting is dominated by monotonous colours; black, white, greyish tones, etc, as well as McCarthy’s description of the landscape. The dying people in Picasso’s canvas can be compared to the cannibals that McCarthy describes later on. This is the picture McCarthy painted on my mind.
As mentioned previously, the first few pages of the novel are key for McCarthy in conveying this deadly landscape to the reader; preparing them for the darkness ahead. His writing is quite simple; very short sentences, which although lack complexity are filled with powerful diction and imagery. The repetition of the words night, dark, grey and cold throughout the first paragraph is evident, and reinforces the idea of this dull, obscure and dead landscape and civilization. An example I particularly like is ‘Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world’. The fact that McCarthy has used the word beyond and more emphasizes the fact that the light and goodness the father and son might have is hopeless and futile when battleing against the landscape among them. The idea is further emphasized by the simile; the verb dimming describes the lack of clarity due to the darkness, thus the creating the idea that there is also no clarity to where the father and son are or are going, again describing the futility of their journey and maybe lives. In contrast, there is also a constant reference to light and life, conveying the idea that there is still seomthing good. Whenever the child or the father are described, their movements are accompanied by words such as ‘softly’ and ‘precious’, depicting the fragileness and importance of their lives. In the second paragraph, McCarthy writes the following: “ With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping”. What I found very interesting of this sentence was how McCarthy describes the light as gray, as if not even the light had life; it’s just gray, like everything else.
McCarthy is able to illustrate such a dark and lifeless atmosphere with the repetitive use of certain words throughout the text, thus enabling the reader to visualize quickly the landscape he is trying to portray. And although the novel itself describes this post apocalyptic world, in which almost everything seems futile and hopeless, there still remains some faith in humanity.
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