"He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mud stained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entailed moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To steal my mouth with dirt" (McCarthy 261).
The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel, written by Cormac McCarthy, that follows the journey of a nameless man and his son, who is also never referred to by name, as they scavenge for food in a barren dustland and slowly make their way south on "The Road, as they look for what they call the "good guys" (McCarthy 103). As they search for food, they are also forced to defend their own against bandits and other people that they come across on their travels. Published on September 26, 2006, the novel was then made into a motion picture by October 8, 2009.
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Some questions to ask yourself as you read this book:
- Why are the characters nameless? Do they need names?
- What could the road symbolize? What about their journey south?
- The boy keeps talking about a little boy they found on the road. What could the little boy symbolize?
- Why do you think happened to the Earth? Why is there dust everywhere?
- What would be different if the boy's mother was alive for the journey?