The Road by Cormac McCarthy"The Road" is an apocalyptic tale of hope and endurance. It tells the story of a boy and his father and their relentless will to survive in a disaster-stricken world. What were once familiar memories to the man are now faint glimmers of a past long gone, and to his son only an imaginable world never truly known. We follow their passage through the countryside and towards the shore in an attempt to escape the numbing cold, hunger and constant threat of death that characterizes their every day. We watch them struggle to hold on to their humanity, to keep believing that there's something better at the end of their odyssey.
With ash strewn about as our only clue, we never really know what caused this state of earthly disarray - a natural disaster perhaps, or maybe a global war? And while I wondered about this while reading the novel, I realize that its not of relevance to the text's core. What really matters is how the characters come to see themselves amidst such unthinkable circumstances, and how they muster the strength to keep going. The monotony of the dialogue and the simplicity of the plot serve well to convey the routine nature of survival and the characters' need to take one day at a time: to live now so they can keep living tomorrow.
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