Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Their light playing over wet flowstone walls. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. The novel’s opening paragraph invokes Plato, Bunyan, Jonah, and Dante: And they show us that we cannot live without hope.

The man and son in this predicament testify by their very existence that humans must live for others, else there’s no reason to live. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. The story confronts us with characters forced moment by moment to recognize what matters. Neither color nor sunshine decks this landscape. Along with the constant threat, McCarthy’s spare prose builds a world in which trinkets and distractions have been stripped away. The man and son on the road live every day knowing that someone is there to shoot them, just around the bend, in the weeds across the ditch, or coming up behind them.

These words, near the end of Flanner O’Connor’s “ A Good Man Is Hard to Find ,” bounced around in my head as I made my way through Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road. (Oct.“She would of been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” 250,000 announced first printing BOMC main selection. McCarthy establishes himself here as the closest thing in American literature to an Old Testament prophet, trolling the blackest registers of human emotion to create a haunting and grim novel about civilization's slow death after the power goes out. The man assures the boy that the two of them are 'good guys,' but from the way his father treats other stray survivors the boy sees that his father has turned into an amoral survivalist, tenuously attached to the morality of the past by his fierce love for his son. Beyond the ever-present possibility of starvation lies the threat of roving bands of cannibalistic thugs. (The man's wife, who gave birth to the boy after calamity struck, has killed herself.) They carry blankets and scavenged food in a shopping cart, and the man is armed with a revolver loaded with his last two bullets. In this landscape, an unnamed man and his young son journey down a road to get to the sea. Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a 'long shear of light and then a series of low concussions' that leaves cities and forests burned, birds and fish dead and the earth shrouded in gray clouds of ash.

The road cormac mccarthy amazon