I have just finished reading The Road and No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and I was very impressed. It has been a long time since I have read any fiction, and McCarthy is proving to be a real treat. I’d have to say I like The Road more out of the two, and that the film adaptation of No Country was excellent. I think the Coen brothers did an superb job of echoing McCarthy’s no-frills approach towards storytelling.
I know The Road will be a novel I remember for a long time. Set in post-apocalyptic (most likely post-nuclear, although the novel never specifies) America, it tells the story of a father and son fighting for survival in a hostile world populated by killers and cannibals.
The father is referred to only as “the father,” or “the man,” and the son as “the son,” or “the little boy.” McCathy realizes that you don’t need extensive background to build a memorable character, and the relationship he builds between the two is established strongly at the beginning and grown throughout the novel. You never learn the boy’s age, and it seems like he could be anywhere from 8-12 years old. The man seems torn about whether he wants the boy to know the truth about the world they live in so he can survive better, or if he wants to shield the boy from as much as possible. Either way, the boy cannot escape the horrors of their environment as he encounters everything from a basement full of people being harvested for food to an infant roasted on a spit.
I noticed that a couple symbols from No Country also appeared in The Road, and this was the uniqueness and value of the father-son relationship and also the “carrying of the fire.” No Country ends with Sherriff Ed Tom telling his wife Loretta about a dream he had where his father rode on before him carrying the torch, waiting for him to follow. Several times throughout The Road, this conversation ensues:
‘Because we’re the good guys.
‘Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.’
Since the two are not literally carrying any fire, you can infer that McCarthy uses “carrying the fire” as a symbol to represent goodness and hope in the world, just like in No Country. When the man is dying, and the boy asks if he can go with him, the father tells him “You can’t, you have to carry the fire.”
Another interesting thing about McCarthy’s style is his abandonment of quotation marks. This serves to make the dialogue seem more intimate and more real. Sometimes dialogues can become cluttered by all the punctuation and take away from the message and the feel of the conversation, so McCarthy just gets rid of them altogether.
These are some of my favorite quotes from The Road:
“You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget.”
“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably, but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Thing’s he’d no longer any way to think about at all.”
“What you alter in the remembering has a reality, known or not.”
“People were getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.”
“Where men can’t live gods fare no better.”
I look forward to watching the film adaptation for this novel.
