The Ending in 25 Words....

There’s hope for the boy; he leaves behind his father who’s kept up a state of depression and goes off with, ironically, a ‘nuclear family’. 

Handling of Time (Page 176-196)

‘When did you eat last?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘You don’t remember.’

This shows the reader that there is no reason for people on the road to remember when they have eaten as they have no reason to plan meals. We only plan meals today because our day follows a set routine and we eat to keep up with this. On the road however, day and night have almost become one due to the ash and dust that falls, blocking out the sun. They have no concept of time and no reason for it so all they can really distinguish between is day and night so it is easy to imagine how a person could lose track of the days as they are all the same; as long as they are alive, they have no reason to remember when or what they eat.

‘How old are you?’

Similarly to the food, the old man is unable to truthfully recall his age as there is no reason for him to know it and no reminder of the date. Time and day are hypothetical things created by humans to gain a routine in life. However, mankind is dying out and everybody lives in the moment and has no cause to plan ahead, unless people meticulously count each day then it would be impossible to tell precisely when a year has passed and even if someone did work it out, what would be the point? It’s hardly like they’re going to celebrate.  McCarthy uses the old man as an example to show that in the novel, the reader can never be certain as to how much time has passed, as the characters have no idea either.

‘How long have you been on the road?’ ‘I’ve always been on the road.’

Once again, in this section, McCarthy uses the dialogue between two characters to make the reader question the necessity of time; the fact that the man can’t actually remember how long he has been on the road for suggests that time is insignificant. The way that the man says he has always been on the road would suggest that time is standing still for these people. McCarthy handles time simply by putting a halt to it to show that it is just another thing on the road which is dying.

‘People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasnt getting ready for them.’

This quote is suggesting that for all the care we take over time, it doesn’t care about us. It is telling the reader that all the worry we have over keeping to a schedule is ridiculous because time is a made up thing and isn’t going to alter itself to suit us. All the people who worried and invested plans in the future, ironically, weren’t actually as prepared for the next day as they could have been where as those who take each day as it comes are surviving still as they had no expectations and don’t need time to rule their lives.

‘In the morning the stood in the road’

McCarthy gives the reader absolutely no idea what time in the morning they are talking about to once again highlight the lack of importance time holds for people on the road. All they have to go by is the road; they walk along it when it is light enough and sleep when it isn’t, to them it is completely irrelevant what time it is as they have no goals in life other than to get to the sea as quickly as possible with no real aim when they get there, meaning that they can take as long as they need to.

‘In the early afternoon’

McCarthy uses slightly more detail in this section. This could be because this is the first time phrase used since they left the old man alone in the road so the man and they boy are paying more attention to time as they are feeling guilty, wondering where the old man is and how long he has been left on his own for.

‘In the night he woke in the cold dark’

McCarthy uses this phrase to lead onto ‘coughing and he coughed till his chest was raw’ to fit in with the image that cold dark night quite often symbolise death, something that we know is imminent for the man but the way the author associates it with time suggests that his time is running out quickly.

‘You said it would last a few weeks’ ‘I know.’ ‘But it’s just been a few days.’

This back up the previous quote in suggesting that time is speeding up and things are going a lot quicker than the man and the boy expected them to.

‘He’d slept little in weeks.’

This shows McCarthy skipping through time to move the novel on but also showing the rapid declination of the man’s health, he gets several weeks worse in the few seconds it takes the reader to read it, to emphasize the point. 

The Little Mermaid....The Seaweed is always Greener........

When he found her she was sat on a rock amongst the sharp corals of the earths floor motionless. The lank seaweed straggling through her hair in unison with the waves which circled round like a net, isolating their world from the suns warm heart and encasing the merpeople in one cold and translucent bubble. The crab swam closer. He crossed the mass graveyard of deserted shells which littered the sea bed carelessly scattered in all directions, crumbling at a touch, dissolving into nothing.
The Mermaids face was still alabaster pale as her fathers words danced around her head like taunting ghosts. Her glare flitted briefly from the sky above to the crab and back again, resting there until a passing ship covered the gap in the rocks, finishing the seal between her and the land. The crab sat beside her.
The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake. Ok.
Ok.
Still perched on the rock the mermaid listened as the crab pumped a heavy tune from the organ placed in the centre of the cave. His desperate attempts to glorify living under the sea became lost and buried in the ruins of the ship wreck from the night before. In a world of his own deep thoughts the crab disappeared only stopping to take breath, ranting at the mermaids contradictions. Oh Christ.  His scarlet face drained of all colour and his sudden silence shot the atmosphere dead. She was gone.
He searched for days, the trail long and never ending. Visiting the far corners of the sea bed he saw no other fish or turtle or mollusc and spent the time dodging falling fragments of casually disregarded filth sent from the shore above. When he woke in the morning from yet another restless night he walked out into the ocean and sat on a pile of rubble looking at the corroding landscape unable to see the life the ocean once held for him. At that moment he heard the mermaids voice, so distinguished yet muffled by the waters torrent. The crab put his things in his bag threw his bag over his shoulder and ran faster than he had breath enough to do so.
On coming closer, the sound getting clearer he stopped dead. Oh Christ he repeated. Oh Christ, as he followed the mermaid into the cave of the sea witch. He crept through a rock at the side of the cave and plunged into the blanket of darkness only to be greeted by the witches eels, their illuminating eyes piercing the dark haze.
Run, he whispered. But his words we lost to the Mermaid. She acknowledged him with a spiteful glance then turned her attentions back to the sea witch and carelessly bargained her voice for as if it a broken instrument. Unable to stop her, restrained by the guards the crab looked on.
The sharp air spat water in disgust at their appearance on the surface. Grainy sand. Dull clouds. Silence. What had she done?  

Theft of the Belongings........
      This section of the book is hugely significant as it see’s the man and the boy working together to find the thief of their belongings. This shows that after all the terrible things that have happened to the pair, something good has come out of it, the boy has learnt to be independent and brave. This is shown when he finds the trail of sand; as opposed to the father finding the clues and running off while the son follows, the boy is now the one making the decisions and acting on his own accord, rather than timidly standing in the background while his father runs off. Typically of the book though, this has to be ruined somehow and this happens when the two of them find the thief. Before they get to him though, pathetic fallacy is used as a foreshadowing element to the section of the book; they were in the ‘long dusk’ when they overtook the thief. In poetry and books, night time is often used as a way to symbolize death, the end of a day equating to the end of a life. In this part of the road though, it is only nearly dark which makes the reader expect a near death experience which is ultimately what happens. When they find the man he is wearing ‘stinking rags’ which represent the fact that in the world, the outside appearance is all that anyone takes into consideration; his rotting clothes resemble his rotting soul which caused him to steal the cart in the first place, the thief himself is the epitome of an apocalyptic world; rotten on the outside and on the inside and with the ability to ruin life for everyone else. What happens next could be seen to be the most sickening thing in the entire book; the reader, who has become attached to the man and his son, watches in horror as the father effectively kills an innocent man while he begs for forgiveness. Not only does he do this, he strips him physically of all his clothes, but mentally of all his dignity and treats him like an animal which until this point he has been horrified by the way people treat other people. It is at this point where the reader sees the turn of events, the boy who was before this, beginning to reassure the reader that if his father should die then he would be able to take care of himself, stands hiding behind his father crying like a baby. This section shows the reader that their hope of the boy’s independence has failed as they probably figured it would, but at the same time, the boy is still innocent, and in the apocalyptic world, this is more valuable than anything else. In a world where lives are ruined, there is an innocence within the boy that just can’t be corrupted. This is something which is so significant and powerful that it changes the man’s mind and he agrees to leave the clothes by the side of the road for the thief to find. 

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. 

The Baby on the Spit........

      In comparison to the other key episodes, there isn’t much tension built up before the discovery of the baby; the reader knows that something significant is going to happen, the ‘smoke stood vertically in the air’ which resembles an image of hell, but unlike some of the more horrifying aspects of the book, this is portrayed as more of a dark scene which isn’t supposed to scare the reader, just more shock them into realising the man and the boy’s reality. Once again, the man and the boy are very cautious when getting closer to the danger but as per usual, the man insists on going nearer, worried for his son’s physical health, but in doing so he exposes him to a baby on a spit and wonders ‘if he’d ever speak again’, harming his mental health. This repetition of circumstances shows the reader that there is nothing that anyone can do right; if the man hadn’t taken his son towards the smell of food then he would die of starvation, yet this constant exposure to horrific things if gradually killing off his son’s spirit which is measured by the gradual disintegration of the world as it unravels and more and more things become ruined. When they do come across the baby, it is described to be ‘a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit’. This mirrors the thought that all humanity is being lost and also that all emotion is gone too. The baby isn’t described as such; it’s named ‘an infant’ to show that the characters can’t afford to feel any emotion towards it. The fact that it’s headless and gutted also shows the reader that people just see other people as animals, there is no humanity left other than people’s existence, they’re no longer living as humans, just mere beings, walking the Earth until their ultimate death. This is also shown within the section as the characters are described to be ‘pilgrims reroute to their several and collective deaths’ which shows the reader that they seem to be being conned by God; their walking on a pilgrimage to learn something about God and make some significant discovery, yet once on their mission, all they learn is that God is evil and corrupt and is making them walk straight to their deaths. After this awful incident however, the reader gets an insight into how the boy’s mind is slowly turning as pessimistic as everyone else’s as they see him run which the man tells us ‘he’d not seen in a long time’, giving the impression that, up until this point, the boy had been too depressed at some of the things he had seen, but after this incident, he got over so quickly as the element of surprise at seeing a horrible sight had disappeared and was no longer something which affected him. This sickens the reader as, not only is he completely fine at seeing a charred baby, he runs and plays and acts like a normal child would had they stumbled across any other cooked animal. It shows us that the boy, who started the book with all the innocence the world had left, has lost it all and now, like every other man or woman left walking the Earth, see’s all humans as animals and nothing more. 

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.