Finding the People in the Cellar....

      The reader’s first impression of this section in the book is that the man and the boy are stood before what we would consider to be a haunted house; this instantly suggests that there is something, not only dangerous about the house, but also something slightly spooky and odd which acts as a foreshadowing event; as opposed to the man who had been struck by lightning or watching the baby being roasted on the spit, finding the people in the cellar is less effective in a dramatic sense as it just seems to resemble a scene out of a horror film, the bodies are limbless and the people whisper ‘help us’ to the man and the boy and come across as zombies as opposed to living human beings. This could have been the intention of McCarthy; he makes the people seem fictional to show how the desperate times have affected people’s views on the world and that they now see other humans as food with no rights, like animals. Although the start of the scene acts as a foreshadowing event for the rest of the section, it also serves as a warning to us that if anything like this were to happen to the world, we would effectively be living in a horror film. This feeling of apprehension is continued onto the next page where the two find a pile of clothes and bedding in the corner of a room which adds to the eerie feel and shows the reader that something isn’t right. After this, the boy and the man talk for a few lines and typically, in the style of a horror film, one of them insists on walking into danger; the man tells his son ‘we have no choice’ while the boy reluctantly follows and they inevitably come across something creepy and encounter danger; all of these things show how influenced by horror films McCarthy is, which makes the reader more impressed when the events of the book unravel and they realise that they haven’t anticipated anything that has happened. The next part to this section is when they actually walk down the steps into the cellar; to start with the sentences are short with a lot of commas and full stops to break up the paragraph which represents the man and the boy in the dark, wondering what they are about to come across, the fact that they can’t see is shown through the structure, yet when the man ‘held out the light’ the sentences come to life; they become longer and more complex as the man and they boy and see clearly again and, although it’s not a pleasant sight, the reader feels more relieved and this is due to McCarthy’s manipulation of how the part of the book is read as it allows the reader to see (once again) that fear of the unknown is a lot greater than fear of something you know about. The next part of this section is the point where they actually come face to face with the people in the cellar; this scene is horrific from all angles. The fact that humans have stooped to such a level is a disturbing thought for any reader; it isn’t imaginable that mankind would ever be capable of something like this, yet only a few decades ago, the holocaust was happening. The way that the people in the cellar are just left like animals and left to starve, naked and treated so badly does in a small sense resemble a concentration camp which I think McCarthy has included in order to remind the audience that, yes, his work is fiction, but although we judge and assume that it could never happen, under severe circumstances, similar things have happened. This notion makes the reader not only scared for the characters, but also for the human race as they suddenly become aware that what is being described could actually occur. The final part of this section centres around the man debating what to do in order to protect his son. Something which begins to become apparent is that his use of phrases such as ‘Oh God’ and ‘Oh Christ’; the difference in this case thought, is that he uses capital letters for ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ where as, in earlier parts of the book her doesn’t. The difference seems to be that, at this time, he knows how important it is that someone hears him and in order to do that, he knows he needs God where as in the earlier scenes, he has been in shock but never any real danger and shows the reader the hypocrisy; he has lost his faith, that much is obvious, yet when he is desperate, he still relies heavily on a God who he doesn’t care for any longer.