'The Road' vs 'Blindness'

Assignment 2 - 'writing about something the story remined me of'


When I was reading the first part of the book ‘The Road’, I had a lot of difficulties in understanding what it was about. I couldn’t understand the words and I couldn’t put the stories together into one. However, there was one thing that kept me from not giving up. It was the unknown familiarity of the story. I think the familiarity was because of the many apocalyptic movies and books I’ve seen. As I read the book, the story kept on overlapping with a book called ‘Blindness’ by Jose Saramago.

‘Blindness’ is an apocalyptic book. The problem starts when a man suddenly yells out that he cannot see in the middle of the street. Then, the people who had contact with him get the same symptoms. As more and more people start to get this virus, the government decides to lock them in a mental institution. The book is mainly about the story inside this mental institution and the events that happen after they escape and go back into the world.

I think the biggest relation between the two books is that people can’t see well. In the book ‘Blindness’, people with the virus cannot see anything but white waves. They (the infected people) say that they feel like they are swimming in a pool of milk. So, as the story goes on, people learn to conceive things by touching them and to keep balance without looking. Similarly, if you see on page 15, the man says, ‘The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening.’ At first, people who can’t see feel like they can’t do anything anymore. However, as time passes they get used to it and they can live with it. Although it is a common plot used by authors I always feel amazed and touched by human’s adapting abilities. I mean, you can just experience it by turning off the light and staring at the darkness for a few minutes. Your eyes adapt and you can see distant outlines of some objects around you.

Another thing that caught my eye was the strong relations that seemed to form or get stronger as the tragedy progresses. In ‘Blindness’, people were complete strangers at first. However, as people strived to survive, they became bonded together. They shared even the littlest piece of crackers and held hands so that they wouldn’t fall apart. Similarly, in ‘The Road’, the man and the boy had a very strong bond. If you see on page 29, the author narrates that the man knew ‘That the boy was all that stood between him and death.’ Not only that, the boy seems to care about the man if you see him trying to share with the man, Coca Cola and Cocoa. I think this is why I like by apocalyptic pieces so much. As I read the book, I could feel how important it is to keep strong bonds and form great relationships. Caring about one another and surviving altogether as a result of each other’s sacrifices, it seems so great and makes me feel thankful and happy that they all survived.

But, more than the two points I made above, the thing that most reminded me of the book ‘Blindness’ was the supermarket and the continuous mentioning of other survivors. In the book ‘Blindness’, there are a lot of scenes where people violently fight over food because there are so few. The scene that struck me the most was the scene where people were all fighting with each other in a supermarket. In this scene the woman who still has her sight, finds a storage room underground. She silently moves down and finds food to take to her people. But, before she leaves the room, she opens up a sausage to eat it because she was so hungry. However, starving people smelled the sausage and started running for her! It was so freaky, gross and violent but it was really interesting too. Anyways, the man in ‘The Road’ also says on page 42 that ‘It was for us and it will be for others and we don’t know who they will be and we can’t hear them coming. It’s not safe.’ Not only that, he keeps on saying things like ‘This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it was day.’(p.5). At first, I couldn’t get what it means. From the earlier descriptions, there was supposed to be nothing but this man had a fear of something. However, from the page 28, ‘In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees.’ and page 46 ‘We’re not the first ones here.’ I was able to remember the striking scene from the ‘Blindness’ and understand that the fear the man had was directed at the other survivors.

As I read this story, I could find many connections between the two books. In some ways these books are very different. However, I found that after I related two books together, it made the book a little bit easier to understand. While reading the next part of the book, I will try to connect it more with other stories so that I can understand better.

Diana's Response p. 1-50

"Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he
said. You might want to think about that.
You forget somethings, don't you?
Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you
want to forget." p. 12

Two things are happening in this dialogue: 1) the man is trying to protect his son from being affected by the images of death and decay surrounding them by telling him to exert control over what he witnesses and 2) the antithesis in the last sentence reveals the little control that the man has himself over his memory. The relationship between the man and the boy is at times one of mutual help, but more often the father tries rather futilely to protect his son. However, in this world he does not have enough control to truly protect his boy from hunger or from horror. His effort to do so is moving. Throughout the early part of the novel, the man struggles with dreams and memories of life before the apocalypse as he is unable to reconcile the world he used to know with the reality before him now. Ironically, the son is better able to cope with the world than his father, having grown up in it.

"The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all." p. 28

Here, the man is reflecting on the early days after the world changed from what it was before and again having trouble reconciling his past with his present. However, the reflection is that the boy already understands the present very well, having grown up under only the conditions that exist at that moment. Earlier, when the boy drank the coke and he asked his father if he'd "ever" have one again his father claimed ever was a long time. But now we can see that the boy's sense of time is different and more practical for this new world than his father's. He accepts the loss of things like coke and civilization as normal and regular. "Ever" then, is a condition of things, rather than a length of time.

"Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? p. 32"

Again we see the difference in the perceptions of the world of the man and the boy. For the man, the world exists in this ashen, decayed state as a loss of what once was. For him, things in the world are "never to be" again, and he cannot stop thinking about the possibilities. For the boy, these things simply never were. He does not feel the aching loss of his mother because he was too young to know her. He does not worry about the past; in fact, he is somewhat afraid of knowing it, like his fear when the man took him to his childhood home.