Getting to Shore........

      The beginning of this section starts out as being fairly positive; the man and they boy are well fed, they have ‘new blankets and jars of canned goods’ and the language is quite positive. The problem is that, through the manipulation of McCarthy, the reader has been trained to get into the mindset of the characters and so naturally expects something to go wrong. The man admits to this feeling as the narrator tells the reader that, ‘he knew that he was placing hopes where he’d no reason to’ which shows the reader that he knows that all remotely good things must come to an end. This feeling is continued in the next paragraph as the man talks about things such as a torch that he hoped to fin batteries for....but didn’t, and, the hope that the world would get lighter....but it but gets darker, to show that there is no point in having any hope as it just ends in despair, something which he can’t afford to expose his son to. There are also a lot of links to McCarthy’s influences in this section, he mentions ‘men walking around in their graves’ which is something associated with horror stories and zombies, something which is a relevant subject of the author’s interests. The idea of zombies is also conveyed through the structure of some of the paragraphs; the methodical way by which McCarthy lists everything that he does is symbolic of the thought process of a zombie, they have no time for outside thoughts and like the man and the boy, can only focus on what they are currently doing on a very basic thought process. The final part of this section which shows the reader the terrible state they are in is ‘the grey beach’. The beach normally symbolizes a place where children go and play, build sandcastles and is quite a memorable experience, yet for the boy, his father has to apologise to him for the fact that the sea isn’t blue. This is also quite a sad moment as the reader feels the struggle for the man; he clearly sees that he is the person who is supposed to make his son’s life perfect, yet he apologises to him because the sea isn’t blue enough and shows the reader that he truly feels like the weight of the world is resting on his shoulders.