SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!SPOILER ALERT!
The Road, a fantastic book written by Cormac McCarthy, was my selection for the Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) project. The book was fantastic and I loved reading it, but I didn't always. The beginning of the book, like most books, didn't capture my attention. Instead, the main characters repeated a pattern of wake up, walk down the road, eat, sleep, and do it all again. This happenened like six times before anything actually thrilling happened. Then, there food is stolen and they search for more. Later they come to gunpoint with a peeing man in the woods, who (Spoiler Alert!) the man ends up shooting. Throughout the novel, the inseparable duo sleeps and wakes, finds and loses, gains and falls, and, ultimately, gets separated by the one thing higher on the food chain than humans: death.
For me, one of the hardest stylistic features to overcome was McCarthy's lack of quotation marks, but he does make an effort to separate the dialogue from block text. As I read, I realized that the boy liked to ask a lot of questions, such as "Were going to be okay, aren't we papa" (McCarthy 83) and "Cant we help him papa" (McCarthy 50), to which the man replied with single word answers. What was really interesting to me is that over the course of the book, the man begins to speak more, using more than one-worded responses and actually initiating conversation. All the while, the boy asks less questions and instead responds to his father with answers his father said earlier in the book.
One of of the most memorable moments in the novel was when the man and his son were walking down the road and they heard a rumbling in the distance: the roar of a semi engine. They quickly tip their grocery cart of supplies in a ditch and jump into the bushes. The truck stops right in front of them and some men get out to "unlatch and raise the hood" (McCarthy 62), while one of them walks over to the bushes to you-know-what. As he began to pee in front of the man and the boy, the man "cocked the pistol and held it on the man" (McCarthy 62). They argue for a bit before the bandit dives to grab the boy in a headlock (McCarthy 67) and the man is left with no choice but to shoot the ill tempered bandit. The shot is loud enough for the other bandits to hear, so the man grabs the boy, who is now crying, and runs off away from the bandits' semi. This was one of the most action packed moments in the book, and probably the turning point in my personal interest in the book.