So far, The Road has been very interesting and difficult for me. Sometimes I read the book and I don’t understand half of what the page say, that I wonder if I am reading a book written in English or some other foreign language. But I am really interested in the book, and I want to find out what happens in the end.
I decided to find three quotes I liked. Well, here’s the first one.
‘Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.’(p.6)
I can just imagine the father and the boy walking along a barren, gray road. The father will be pushing a rusty, dirty grocery cart. The boy would be trailing along with his father; they would be close, side-by-side. They are each other’s only companion, because they cannot trust other people. They would be each other’s only comfort, only hope.
‘Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite.’ (p.15)
Here the speaker describes what it is like to wake up at night, in the dark. There are no lights (it’s gray in the day, practically no light at night, I suppose) and the huge, indefinite darkness just surrounds you. You don’t need eyes since you can’t see an inch in front of your nose; you just go swinging your arms to detect any obstacles you might get into. The ‘arms oaring’ part might describe the speaker swinging his arms and it might look like he’s oaring in a boat to get somewhere. So if he’s really oaring, what is he trying to reach? We don’t know, and probably the speaker doesn’t, either. Reaching for the unknown, it might be a matrix or a lode, nobody knows. The stars circle Earth, and in earth this unknown place belongs, and the speaker is ‘oaring’ around this unknown place, trying to reach a place he can feel safe.
The next to are connected to each other.
‘He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.’ (p.5)
‘The boy’s shadow crossed over him… God’s own firedrake.’ (p.31)
Both these phrases connect the boy with God, and I think the speaker is seeing the boy as a messenger of God. The boy is innocent and kind at heart, small enough to play with just a truck, but he is mature enough to watch over his father and point out promises that his father had broken. I think the boy is sort of a companion and a guardian who leads the man through the story. These are the phrases I liked, and even though they are complex it felt nice to try to explain them and understand them in my own way. But still, there are sentences of which I feel are unexplainable to anyone but the author.
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I don't think we need to ask the author to understand these sentences--you're doing a fine job of looking closely at McCarthy's unusual use of language to create quite powerful and bizarre images. The whole passage on p. 15, from which you took the second quote, is at once vivid and dense. I had to read through it several times, and you've still added more to my thinking about that passage in your reflections here.
ReplyDeleteAlso the boy as a messenger for God might be a symbol. Watch if later parts of the book confirm or contradict that idea.
Great work here, Tracy.