A Nice Little Analysis Of The Road

With Cormac Mcarthy's book The Road, life in a post-apocalyptic world is duller and bleaker than ever. Never have I seen a book with a sense of barrenness, isolation, or hopelessness be such a prevalent theme, even in a book about the end of the world. Page for page, the reader is almost consistently bombarded with new ways to feel hopeless for the characters. Usually, books like this instill a hastened sense of survival; they have an almost hurried pace to them as the characters scramble to survive. The Road, however, is far from hurried. Each page seems to drag on as the characters are in no apparent rush as though they have nothing to fear: no one to avoid or flee from.

Even when the pair find themselves in an old grocery store, a place with more than a few places for people to set up traps for scavengers, they take the time to look through each individual isle and shelf, seemingly unaware they they could be in danger (22). After a while of anticipating some kind of surprise attack on the father and son, I finally realized that they weren't too concerned because there were very few, if any, other survivors. This isolation, I think, is a recurring theme throughout the book or at least the portion I've read already. As I continue reading the book, I sincerely hope (but hardly expect) to be presented with a break, even if a brief one, from the isolation and perhaps even the introduction of a new character.