Wednesday, January 26, 2011
The Road 1/26/2011
In The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a father and his son journey to survive in a post-apocalyptic society. I have noticed that many contexts of this book show hopelessness, darkness, with little humanity portrayed. In the opening passage I have found the descriptions of the days, nights, and surroundings to be very close to how I would envision a post-apocalyptic society would look and feel to the people living in this distraught world. It states in the beginning, nights were dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before (3). The darkness and grays portray a common loss of hope and that the world can be violent and full of death. Although there are times where there are signs of humanity between the father and his beloved son, I cannot get over what the world has come to at this point. How could a person survive conditions like this, and how could anyone raise a child? It is a possibility with religious beliefs behind a person. I have found on the first page a couple of sentences that portray a scene in the Bible. It states, their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of a gigantic beast. This seems to portray the story of Jonah. Also, on page 31 it talks about reciting a litany. A litany is a tedious ritual or prayer that is common for someone of the catholic faith to take part. Although the father has not mentioned God or any particular religious deity to his son, he has told old stories of courage and justice. This could be from a religious text that the father had remembered. The text that I have read so far imply that the father is a religious man and it seems to be helping both the father and the son as they struggle to survive in this dark and gray society.
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I'm curious why the father hasn't spoken more overtly about God to his son. It seems that he would want to pass his religion on to the boy to keep the christian faith going after he dies. I think that the man may have let his faith lapse before the apocalypse only to find it again afterward, and he remembers the morals but not always the teachings; basically, that he's a believer but not a preacher or perhaps is a more general kind of spiritualist.
ReplyDeleteI noticed that you talk about the difficulty that would be seen from such a circumstance. I agree that the circumstances of a post-apocalyptic world would seem quite overwhelming. I would probably be overwhelmed, as any other human but the father has something worth fighting for. I honestly do not see how he makes it through each day. The acknowledgement of religious text reading was great. I had totally read over that and did not know what a litany was. That was quite informative.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t realize that God was portrayed or even acknowledged by the father (thanks for pointing this out). I am baffled by the idea that the child has no connection to any religion. What I do not quite understand is if in fact the father has found God again through this experience of this post- apocalyptic world and in the case he did, will he share it with his son at all or is he just a person who in fact has turned away from God like so many people do when their whole world crashes? I wonder if religion be expressed more prominently in the later parts of the book as well.
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