While reading The Road at Starbucks, someone came up to me and said, “That book is so boring.” I had to disagree. He was referring to the stylistics and the (he argued) over-done portrayal of “the human condition.” I feel that McCarthy is successful in his use of language in portraying a very real image of a post-apocalyptic world. The monotony of the language, the short sentences, and the sense of greyness that pervades the novel convey a very believable empty, threatening, and decaying post-apocalyptic world.

I was incredibly interested in the boy’s attitudes and actions. I was particularly surprised by the fact that a boy, who is young enough to be playing with a toy truck, is mentally mature enough to not just question but have a sense of knowing the type of situation he is living and the kind of future that is on the horizon, if there is a future at all. Beyond the eeriness of a young boy asking if he is going to die, telling his adult father to be more straightforward, and whether or not he and his father will be reduced to cannibalism in their struggle, the boy’s hyper-awareness signals what type of shifts might happen in a world devoid of a foreseeable future.

I was surprised that the boy’s attitude is not overwhelmingly hopeless. In fact, there is really no question in the boy’s mind about whether or not there is a need to carry on towards the south, even though there is no promise of a better life there. His focus is centered on a desperate need to really know that he is good, that he and his father are on the “right” side, the “winning team.” The dualistic thinking that springs out of “nothingness” says a lot about the way we think. I can’t even imagine being one of the only humans left, especially if my perception of others “like” me was that they were cannibalistic monsters out to get me.  For me, the fear and confusion and complete lack of recognizing or knowing anything, the abandonment of any sense of regular routine would be traumatic, and indeed proves traumatic for the man and his son.

The trauma of a post apocalyptic world forces the boy and his father to find pathways to understanding their place in the world after the world as they know it has ended. This addresses why the boy is so “hung up” on finding a way to believe that he is good, which would help him to distinguish himself from the very “scary” people he’s seen and from his father’s characterization of the “bad” others. Kermode touches on how people understand apocalypse by seeing where they fit in the timeline of history and in relation to the impending end. But how does one find a place in time, when time has ceased to exist? I’m fascinated by how the characters have to adjust their “normal” mindsets because the world they live in is so completely outside of normalcy. I am interested to see how the characters reconcile the state of the world with their need to “fit into history” as the novel progresses.

Where we’ve left the boy and his father is troubling to me. They have found relief that is so lavish and incredible, that I feel it might actually hinder their ability to carry on once the excitement wares off. I kept noting that the characters snapped into a sense of normal routine so quickly that it’s as though they’ve forgotten what’s really going on outside. I wonder if their “re-realization” will jar them into another trauma that they perhaps cannot recover from. I think this is a more likely possibility for the man because he experienced “normal” life in a way that the boy did not, and so he may have more difficulty revisiting the reality of his situation. They used this refuge to slip into past lives that are simply not sustainable given the state of the world they live in, if they get lost in an idealized fantasy of what their lives have become I think it may prove problematic later on. I’ll be looking out for how this experience effects them as I consider the ways the characters deal with their situation psychologically.