The Road Reading #1: Pages 1-60

Hello there!

Welcome to my blog! My name is Charlie, and I’m here to share with you my thoughts, opinions, and overall analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. My goal is to allow you to come along with me on this journey through what should be an incredibly interesting novel. In this particular blog post, we will be going over the first reading section of the novel. Because McCarthy wrote the novel with no chapters, we will be looking at the first 60 pages of the novel. In those first 60 pages, I’ll be analyzing the imagery and selection of detail that McCarthy utilizes to impact how we as the reader view the setting and situation of the main characters. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

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Before I get too far in depth in regards to the setting and tone of the novel, I want to express my feelings towards the reading section and how I felt about it. Going into this book, I was very excited by the concept. A book of literary merit placed in post-apocalyptic America?? It felt almost too good to be true. Plus, I had only heard incredible things in regards to Cormac McCarthy. My first minor skepticism came in my reading of the first couple of pages. There were no chapters and no quotation marks and commas. I’ll further explore how that impacts my reading experience in a future blog. In any case, my skepticism was wiped away quickly by an incredibly interesting section of reading. The story so far has kept me hooked throughout and feels far from the typical “I have to read this book in school as a requirement” novel. The story of a father and son struggling to traverse a scorched and barren country has me completely hooked right now, and I’m eager to continue reading into the next section.

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To begin with, as I stated earlier, I would like to dedicate this first blog post to exploring how McCarthy utilizes imagery in his writing to greatly influence how the reader envisions the story. In this section, there are plenty of examples that greatly impacted my perspective on the story and the tone of the story. Of these examples, the most blatant one in my opinion has to be McCarthy’s repeated descriptions of corpses that are found commonly through the father and son’s journey so far. While the duo is traveling through an abandoned city to reach the father’s childhood house, McCarthy writes a passage describing the dead men and women that the father sees on the streets around him. That passage:

“The mummied dead everywhere. The flesh cloven along the bones, the ligaments dried to tug and taunt as wires. Shriveled and drawn like latterday bogfolk, their faces of boiled sheeting, the yellowed palings of their teeth.” (McCarthy 24)

As you can see, his description of the burnt people is just a TINY bit more intense than Mufasa’s death seen in The Lion King. The harsh imagery used in describing human remains was commonplace throughout the first section of the novel. In writing these graphic descriptions, McCarthy shocks the reader and incites a feeling of horror and disgust in them. This adds greatly to the doomsday feeling of the novel experienced by the reader thus far.

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However, graphic corpses are not the only example of imagery being utilized by McCarthy to manipulate the reader’s perspective and the tone of the story in this section. He also provides us with detailed imagery describing the environment the main characters are placed in. It is made clear numerous times just how scorched the landscape of the USA was. The father and son view the abandoned world through seeing how barren cities were filled with “[c]ars in the street caked with ash” and “[f]ossil tracks in the dried sludge” (McCarthy 12), or through describing the natural side of things with “flats along the upper river among huge dead trees” and the “raw dead limbs of the rhododendron twisted and knotted black” (McCarthy 39-40). As seen before with the descriptions of the corpses, McCarthy continues with his dark and almost depressing imagery through a different continuous outlet. He overall manages to further the already ominous and gloomy tone through another example of imagery.

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There are plenty of other examples of intensive imagery found repeatedly through the section, and all of them have the same effect of despair on the reader. Another one of these included is how the food the father and son consume is described. They eat things such as “cold rice and cold beans that they’d cooked days ago” that were “[a]lready beginning to ferment” (McCarthy 29) and a ham that “looked like something fetched from a tomb, so dried and drawn” (McCarthy 17). There is not a single food item in the novel thus far that seems remotely appealing. On top of that, he also discusses how all the river water has turned black.

However, the most disturbing image McCarthy managed to ingrain in my mind through this section is found when the son is discussing his nightmare. The description of the nightmare would be tarnished if I tried to summarize it. His nightmare:

“I had this penguin that you wound up and it would waddle and flap its flippers. And we were in that house that we used to live in and it came around the corner but nobody had wound it up and it was scary” (McCarthy 36).

When viewed separately, this nightmare isn’t incredibly disturbing and doesn’t seem very complex in terms of imagery. But with the imagery McCarthy has used throughout the section, this scene becomes much creepier  and more vivid while the horror-esque tone of despair is present. The simple imagery does enough to contribute to the frightening story that it creates what feels like a scene from the newest horror movie. It becomes even more creepy when you realize that the last line of the section is the son turning to his father after he tried to reassure the young boy. It simply ends the section with “Then he said: The winder wasnt turning” (McCarthy 37).

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Overall, Cormac McCarthy does an absolutely incredible job at managing to utilize imagery and descriptive tools to influence the reader’s perspective on the story and setting. The tone of empty despair and hollowness combined with the graphic and bluntness of his imagery allowed McCarthy to make this feel like a legitimate horror story. Frankly, I have been shocked at how dark the novel has been thus far. All of this has made me want to continue reading even more. In any case, I hope you enjoyed and hopefully I’ll see you back next week!

  -Charlie