The Road Reading #4: Finished Novel

Howdy!

My name is Charlie DeCurtis and welcome back to what is yet another entry in my blog post series where I analyze Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. In this particular post, we will be analyzing the novel as a whole now that I have finished all the reading. As a result, we have much to reflect on. However, we are going to look specifically at whether or not this novel is worthy of being studied in an AP course. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

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Following in the footsteps of the rest of my blogs, I will be sharing my personal thoughts of this final reading section with you. Despite finishing the entire novel, I am only going to focus on sharing my personal thoughts on this last section. I’ll go into my overall thoughts on the novel as a whole in my final blog post. Simply put, I thought this section was a fantastic conclusion to the novel and journey McCarthy wove together and brought us on. McCarthy does an excellent job in this section at building up suspension that something horrible is going to happen through creating tense environments and possibilities repeatedly. Even though I could see the man’s death coming, his drawn out end and conversations with the boy that lead up to it created real sadness in me. To see him have no “happy ending” after overcoming so much adversity and suffering alongside the boy’s reaction to his father passing in front of him really hit me. The novel’s ending of allowing the boy to continue to “carry the fire” was warming despite the depressing scenes preceding it. McCarthy created a perfect ending for what is now near the top of my list of favorite novels while managing to make it follow the tone of the rest of the novel, and I loved all of it.

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After finally finishing the novel, I can quite easily come to the conclusion that The Road is absolutely worthy of being studied in an AP classroom. There are numerous reasons for this. To begin with, Cormac McCarthy’s writing alone is enough to make this novel “AP worthy”. I have already discussed his style in a previous blog. However, there is more to his writing than just his lack of quotation marks and chapters. The biggest portion of McCarthy’s writing that makes him qualified to be studied in an AP environment is the imagery he creates in his stories. In The Road, his ability to design and scenes that immerse the reader in the post-apocalyptic world that the man and boy are stuck in allows for him to manipulate complex emotional shifts and impacts on the reader. And he does this over and over again before and after moving the actual plot of the novel.

“They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless”  (McCarthy 222)

Passages like this one are frequent throughout the novel, guaranteeing the reader feels the hopelessness and horror of the world the two protagonists live in. On top of his utilization of complex language (typically relating to death) to really ensure the reader visualizes exactly what he wants them to, McCarthy continually reminds the reader of the world around them, he only then brings in emotionally jarring scenes, to even further manipulate our emotions. He moves the story in a way that constantly keeps the reader’s emotions rolling, manipulating them to fit his desire and allow the reader to receive the message of the novel as a whole by seeing what they experience. McCarthy’s extremely complex writing clearly makes him worthy of being studied in an AP class.

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One of the big reasons this novel is of literary merit is clearly McCarthy’s writing and language. However, there are other aspects that push this novel over the edge of being of literary merit. On top of his usage of literary devices such as imagery, diction, syntax, etc., the story being told in The Road helps me to believe that this novel is of literary merit. The bonding story of a father and son on a journey across the country alone would not be enough to help in this assessment that the novel is of literary merit. However, it is the realism and hopelessness of this novel that really pushes this novel to be something complex. While most post-apocalyptic novels have at least some sort of safe haven or colony of survivors at the end, The Road only barely has this. There is no band of misfits who can come together to survive and beat the odds. McCarthy writes this story to make it as realistic as possible if our world were to reach an apocalyptic point such as the one in the book. Nobody is worried about anything other than surviving. McCarthy makes it clear that every living human, including the cannibals, are doing whatever it means to survive. They are doing what they do out of desperation and as a method of survival, making the overall idea of  “good guys vs bad guys” a much more moot point.

That difference between The Road and other horror and post-apocalyptic novels is even further exemplified through the foil relationship between the boy and his father. The clash between the man’s understanding that he must do whatever it takes to survive and the boy wanting to look more at morals and be less ruthless and desperate. The relationship between the two is complex enough to show the difference in age and experience and youth.

Which leads me to my next point: The Road could be incredibly helpful on the AP Literature exam. There is so much character complexity in the two main characters. On top of this, there is an abundant amount of themes, literary devices, and meanings of survival and human life in what is actually a  journey across the country. There are just so many different aspects of it that can be analyzed and used as examples that would perfectly fit quite a few question 3 prompts the CollegeBoard could throw at their test takers.

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Overall, I truly believe this novel should be added to the AP curriculum next year. While many of the novels we currently read have dark undertones and moments such as The Handmaid’s Tale and A Brave New World, none of them come close to reaching the bleakness of The Road. That alone creates a great contrast in the curriculum that would provide a more expansive reach of the types of books read in the classroom. On top of that, as I stated earlier, there is so much to analyze and understand, whether that is through the characters, the setting, or the plot. McCarthy provides a unique reading experience that would really open students eyes to a different style of future based novels. I also clearly believe the novel is of literary merit, but I am not the only one. The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, one of the most prestigious awards a novel can win, demonstrating the excellence of journalism and literature. It has won many other awards on top of the Pulitzer.

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Once again, thank you for reading my blog! I hope you enjoyed! McCarthy brought me something I never expected through The Road. However, because I have finished the novel, this is our penultimate blog in this series. Until next time,

-Charlie