The Road - Blog 1

The Road has not reminded me of any book I have read.  The writing style is similiar to McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, using sentence fragments, lots of similies, and no quotation marks, but the story is very different.  The motion in the novel is walking, at least for the man and his child.  They move through the vast, gray wasteland of a country that few people now inhabit.  The men in the truck that the man and child have to run from are moving by truck, but their truck breaks down and they too have to walk a ways.  McCarthy's juxtaposes short, sentence fragments with long sentences involoving many actions.  "A pool of guts....No pieces of clothing.  Dark was coming on again and it was already very cold and he turned and went out to where he'd left the boy and knelt and put his arms around him and held him" (71).  This sentence structure allows the reader to feel what the man is feeling.  He is quickly looking around, noticing the pool of guts and everything lying around the dead man that he shot, and then he is doing what he can to make his child feel safe.  The sentence structure creates a feeling of confusion with the fragments, and then quick action with the long sentence using many verbs. 
The man and the boy are "each the other's world entire" (6).  On the last night the man and his wife are together, she tells him, "The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself.  I know because I would never have come this far.  A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost" (57).  The only reason the man and the child are surviving is that they have each other.  For some reason, the man and child were not enough for the mother to want to survive, but I do not know why.  Why was her heart "ripped out the night [the child] was born?"  The father and son love each other so much but the mother did not even care.  I am worried that the father and son are going to be torn apart because of everything that is happening through the course of the story, like the father not helping the man struck by lightning, and the father shooting the man from the truck.  We'll see.