The Road — Reflection #5
We have reached the end of the road (pun intended!). For my last post on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I will discuss the book in its entirety, how the man and boy’s journey has affected me, and the regular analysis of the final 50 or so pages.
In this final section of The Road, the survival of the man and the boy is threatened, as the boy comes down with a raging fever. As he laid next to his sickened child, the man whispered “I will do what I promised… No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.” This occurred on the beach of an ashen-gray ocean, where people symbolically depart for new lands, similar to how the man and boy would depart the known world if the man had been forced to keep his promise. He was not.
After the boy’s miraculous recovery, another traveler happens upon their cart while the two are scouting the area, and steals their remaining supplies. “They took everything.” Ironically, it’s actually the man’s fault, as he had fired his newly-discovered flare pistol in the dead of the night, signalling to the world their existence. They followed the tracks of the traveler to the road, where they searched for sand on the asphalt like two hounds on a hunt. Before the day left, the man and the boy “overtook the thief, bent over the loaded cart, trundling down the road before them… holding a butcher knife.” Here, the syntax consists of short, simple sentences that convey ravenous fury. “Get away from the cart and put down the knife.” Additionally, the pronouns used to identify the traveler shifts from “the thief” to “the man” to “he”, gradually making the traveler seem to be less of a threat. Consequently, the traveler refers to the boy first as “the boy”, then “the kid”, and finally “the child” — citing the boy’s youth and innocence while creating an emotional appeal to the man, who threatens to shoot the traveler. The man decides not to kill the traveler, instead taking back the cart and quickly leaving. However, as the boy later stated, taking their supplies back “did kill him.” The boy was remorseful for the days following.
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A few days after, the man and boy walked into a seemingly-abandoned town, and the man was shot. With a boy and arrow. Admittedly a clever and reusable weapon, it is ironic that the man could have died from simple blood-loss from such an archaic weapon — again referencing a retraction in civilization and technology. The particular scene of the man recovering reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s demeanor after he was shot — the boy had asked “What’s the bravest thing you ever did?” The mans reply: “Getting up this morning.”
With so many close calls, it was inevitable that somebody would die at the end of the book. Spoiler alert — it’s the man. It wasn’t sudden; the man died slowly, coughing up phlegm, not being able to walk. This is when the POV of the book shifts focus from the man to the boy. The man died in his sleep, and the boy mourned for three days thereafter (which I believe to be a reference to Jesus’ resurrection three days after his death), until another man found the boy. The boy was hesitant to trust the new man, asking if he was “carrying the fire”, if he ate people, if he had kids, etc… The boy accompanied the man back to his family, leaving his father wrapped in a blanket in the woods. And that was the end of the road.
In reference to the ending of this book, I was wrecked. The last time I had become so attached to a set of characters and had such an emotional reaction to the end of a book was when I finished the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini (published in 2011). The book described a gripping reality in which human nature was thrown out the window, and despite never knowing the names of the man or the boy, their characters were depicted as humanity’s last hope — the last civilized persons. I completely understand why The Road won The Pulitzer. It was one of the best books I’ve ever read; I even promised myself I would never watch the movie for fear of ruining the experience. 10/10 would recommend and read again.
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