The Road by Cormac McCarthy PDF Book
OVERVIEW
The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, features a post apocalyptic world stuck in a nuclear winter. A father and son are the main characters, and they are forced into constant survival mode in the harsh environment, fearing death at every waking turn. The boy, born into the world after its destruction, poses a unique set of morals for all living things, which is seemingly opposed to the father who is immediately on edge facing any other living member of the destroyed world. His mode of action is threatening and always points to the pistol he carries, while the boy seeks to save those they stumble across, as hopeless or hateful as they may seem.
ANALYSIS MICRO
The Road features an interesting moral dilemma between the father and son, who often disagree on moral issues, which curiously enough do not seem to mirror their beginnings. The man, who grew up in the flourishing world, versus the boy who was born just after the onset of the nuclear winter. Aside from this opposition in morals, the man and the boy both dream. The man's dreams are often filled with his wife, who left them at the start of the world's destruction because she believed that their survival was futile. The dreams often placate her features, nipples, breasts, slender frame with which her dress clung to, slightly sexualized and very Freudian. He also dreams of beautiful things, the world as it once was and this scares him further, for he believes the only dreams for a man in peril to be having are perilous dreams. The boy, on the other hand, does not so much dream as have nightmares. Nightmares that haunt him and cause him to cry out for his father. He seems less focused on his mother who he barely mentions and more so focused on the realities of their life. Interestingly enough the boy with the kind heart has the most fear, which the constantly on edge father imagines beautiful landscapes and his wife who deserted them both.
The dreams in the text play a significant role in the storyline. Nights where the man does not dream worry him almost as much as the beautiful dreams he wakes himself from, and express his sexual tension toward his wife who is dead, though he seemingly cannot forgive or forget. The boy's dreams are never fully described yet are always in the form of nightmares, fear for their current situation that he does not express during the waking day. Both the man and the boy's dreams express their inner fears or turmoils, the man's however being the most hyper sexualized and harboring the most psychoanalytic meaning.
ANALYSIS MACRO
The man clearly harbors some unresolved feelings for his wife, though not in the way one might primarily expect. We are given a brief perspective into the wife's coldness with a scene of her leaving. He begs her to stay, to fight for the boy and himself, to try to survive in the ugly and ravished world as best as they could as a family. You can feel the stabbing agony the man feels when the wife tells him she wants to die, that there is no point in try to salvage anything because they will all perish. For such a cold and harsh relaying of reality, the man dreams of her very fondly. He dreams of her in her thin cotton dress, of her breasts and her nipples, her physical features who are described very attractively, in a very wanting way. He loved her very clearly, so much so that even in the current state of affairs the man faces with the boy, his dreams of her are colorful and vivacious, full of youth and beauty as well as desire. The descriptions are very hyper sexualized and outline the man's need for her love, attention and companionship in the desolate landscape which is devoid of all of these things. This only elevates the certainty of the man and the boy's terrible current situation, and seeks to above all show what the man desires most, which is not a paradise of survivors or a inherently a bunker full of food, but the woman. Her touch, her essence, what he lost when the world turned dark. His dreams of her elevate him, and mirror his subconscious desires that waver often from mere animalistic survival.
The man also dreams about nature before its destruction. Of the flower and trees, small things that are taken for granted today, that were gone in their world. It is perhaps this that proves why the man is so angry and hasty when it comes to other survivors. Unlike the boy, he remembers the world in its prime. He also remembers those responsible for its destruction: humans. Mankind's role in the now desolate world is what makes him bitter, what shapes his dreams and fuels his anger. He dreams of the beautiful things of the old world, and this thusly fuels his fire and hatred toward those he meets upon the road, those so capable of destroying nature. The dreams seek to unlock his unconscious morals, they create an anger in him that he directs at others, an anger for what once was but what was taken from him. The dreams are a receptacle throughout the text. They show the power of the subconscious over actions, in this case morals, and also deeply rooted desires and man's need for love and desire in the form of companionship. These dreams throughout the text also keep the man moving foreword and fighting, when he finds himself thinking of the past he awakens with a new stronghold on forgetting the old world and moving forward with the boy for safety. When he does not dream, it is at the worst parts of the text, such as when the boy is dying. The dreams act as a motivating factor, illuminating his purposes, his subconscious desires, and his reason for continuing on down the road.
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