I read the Road a while back and I enjoyed it. I am no literary critic or a great understander of themes found in literature but I found it humbling and interesting. I am wondering what some of you people thought about the book? Themes, meaning etc.
I like to know what other people think. Their analysises.
>Do you carry the fire? "He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."
Caleb Hill
A big part of The Road is idealism and what makes men function. The Man needs someone to need him to keep going, and so he has a bit of a codependent relationship to his son where not only does the son need him, but The Man would probably sink into despair if not for the way his son needs him to live and the faith he has that civilization can recover. In that way it's also about faith and how we need faith in one thing or another to function. It seems unlikely that The Man is religious, but his faith in an indestructible "fire" in certain men is what keeps him going, because he believes he and his son have this flame.
Julian King
>"Turn from those that need you and lose what defines you."
Ryder Morris
Women don't have the fire and should never be trusted with anything important.
Oliver Hill
Is this a book a woman could never understand?
Is it the nature of women to crumble under adversary and run naked into the night?
Lucas Scott
It's my favorite book by McCarthy.
Mr. Trips has a good grasp of the fire.
Another theme is the relationship between the man and his son, the man growing up in the old world(pre-apocalypse) and having old-world ideals and views that he raises his son with, a child of the new-world(post-apocalypse) who knows nothing of what the world used to be. The book mentions many times the rift between father and son, how the father seemed alien to his son, the son seemed like and Angel to his father. They're from two different worlds, and the father struggled to grasp that, especially when the son would act benevolently towards some of the victims in the new-world.
McCarthy stated in that interview with Oprah that gratitude and hope were the moral resolutions that he wanted the reader to get out of it, and you can see how the father tries to teach his kid to stay hopeful and thankful, and the son doesn't quite see things the same way
Luis Brooks
I love women, but this is one of the VERY FEW books I would say 99.9% of women will not be able to empathize with the main themes of.
Angel Gray
It's basically Blood Meridian for genre faggots. Pass.
Brandon Gomez
The main themes of The Road aren't even important to Blood Meridian. If anything, Blood Meridian is the more "genre" book since it's so bloated and full of wild west cowboys and indians.
