The Road

[Anonymous No.5282149]

Well /lit/,

I just finished The Road and I found a few of passages of interest. I didn't mark all of them but here are two:


He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things i sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt. (Page 261/287)

and

He took the cup and moved away and when he moved the light moved with him. He'd wanted to try and make a tent out of the tarp but the man would not let him. He said that he didnt want anything covering him. He lay watching the boy at the fire. He wanted to be able to see. Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in (Page 277/287)

Any thoughts on these selections or just general overarching themes I should have picked up on?

[Anonymous No.5282176]

>>5282149
>There is no God, and we are his prophets

[Anonymous No.5282222]

>>5282149

Great book. Probably the best of the 2000's so far.

[Anonymous No.5282231]

>>5282149
Sorry didnt finish it.

There is no prophet in earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.

[Anonymous No.5282258]

>>5282176
But if it meant there is no god then why does it say "whatever form you spoke of you were right"?

[Anonymous No.5282906]

>>5282258
You'll have to provide some context to that quote. I don't remember by whom or why it is spoken

[Anonymous No.5282913]

>He got up and walked out to the road.
jesus fucking christ

[Anonymous No.5282916]

>>5282913
the book is written simplistically, out of context it seems weird but it actually makes the whole novel more powerful

general theme is IMO not something I agree with,I think the whole thing is too morally simplistic and it does have a bit of a christfag message. that said, I did enjoy it overall

[Anonymous No.5282924]

>>5282916
It's funny how McCarthy doesn't consider himself a spiritual individual, yet professes to envy those with a sense of spirituality and infuses so much of his work with religious undertones.

[Anonymous No.5282975]

>>5282149
Okay I'll bite. My reading of The Road was quick and cursory, so I'm going to try to delve into this a bit. I'm specifically interested in the first passage.

To understand this passage we must consider it in relation to his other works. For example, in Blood Meridian the guiding theme was, to put it edgily, "There is only one god and His name is Violence". But whereas the vibrant and arid colors of the setting of Blood Meridian lend itself to a contemplation on violence, the subdued black and grey of The Road lend itself to a contemplation on Death. Specifically, I would contend that what the Dad was feeling at the beginning of the passage is the omnipresence of death (literally read as an earthquake). The enigmatic language used to describe it heavily suggests the fact.

More than that, we have the descriptions of the crossroads. For the record, salitter=essence of God as used by McCarthy. The images of dolmen stones and shaman's bones at the crossroads strongly conjures the idea of satanic (or, more likely, heathen) rituals with devils, which were traditionally made at crossroads. I think this imagery is meant to evoke the most primitive of religions to the imagination; the worship of death.

Since this passage is very near the end of the novel I'm going to assume this is very close to when the Dad dies, and he knows he is dying by this point. Therefore, the last two sentences are undoubtedly directly referring to Death, with the lines directly before that constituting the Dad's existential crisis on his impermanent existence in this world.

So yes, I believe this passage is altogether talking about a return to the most human state of existence which is complete primitivism. The only deity that holds any power after the death of civilization and God is Death. Death is both the oldest and the only surviving God.

Or something like that.

tl;dr the scenery in the first passage functions as an objective correlative to the Dad coming to terms with the fact that he will die soon

[Anonymous No.5282984]

Didn't realize he used the "dark to dark" thing twice. From Outer Dark:

>She shook him awake from dark to dark, delivered out of the clamorous rabble under a black sun

[Anonymous No.5282991]

>>5282924
He's a Christian.

>>5282984

He actually uses it twice in Outer Dark:

>And as he lay there a far crack of lightning went bluely down the sky and bequeathed him in an embryonic bird's first fissured vision of the world and transpiring instant and outrageous from dark to dark a final view of the grotto and the shapeless white plasm struggling upon the rich and incunabular moss like a lank swamp hare.

[le trole faec ಠ_ಠ !Avm1fqtITk No.5282993]

>>5282149
As far as I can tell McCarthy is talented a complex feeling into what seems abstract, but I haven't yet read blood meridian (it's my Saturday/Sunday goal).

The first passage revealed to me an emotion of a calm despair. The moldering bones of the prophets meaning something about no one predicting this future, and the future being completely unimportant. The speaker knows it is big and powerful but there's nothing to see. Despair, not completely tangible but absolute

[le trole faec ಠ_ಠ !Avm1fqtITk No.5283010]

>>5282149
Also, pay close attention to lighting in McCarthy novels. In No Country, he uses only three color words. I counted about twenty to thirty uses of the word "blue", and constant references to it being cold. The only character who's eyes are described in any capacity are Chigurh's, which are described as the deepest blue, like lapis lazuli. I don't think it's a stretch to read basic symbolism into the book from this, as blue and cold are indicative of death; Chigurh's presence is like death and his eyes are the deepest, serene death.

The second color, used only twice if I can recall, was yellow. Yellow was used to describe the lighting of Bell and I believe Moss's house. Yellow, sick, cowardice.

The last color I can't remember with certainty or with and resolution, I remember noticing it (I believe orange) but I don't remember it's usage.

[le trole faec ಠ_ಠ !Avm1fqtITk No.5283343]

>>5283010
Yeah, I just pulled up a PDF and did some investigation

McCarthy uses the basic six colors in his book, but in different ratios and for different purposes:
Blue- 19 instances
Yellow - 7
Red - 13
Green - 8
Purple - 3
Orange - 5
Black - 31
White - 21

So it seems blue is the most common color still.

Chigurh's eyes are the only described, this I verified

So it might be interesting to reconsider what the light is describing. Here's the instances of yellow:
"Gaunt yellow grass" when describing the initial scene with the dead people
One of a dead hawk: "cold yellow eye dead to the blue vault above them"
Three instances of yellow police tape (may be interpretable)
One comment about a yellow marker being used by Bell to trace a route to Odessa (Bell being a coward?)
Two descriptions of yellow light: once cast on Moss after he lets Chigurh live, and one after Bell signs his resignation papers and goes home

It seems yellow is associated most with weakness and cowardice, and the hawk line seems to be speaking of people's ignorance of Chigurh (blind to the vast blue)

The first instance of blue in the book is when Moss spots the shoot out
Many instances of the whole scene being described in blue (slate-blue water, blue floodplain, a blue world, blue vault,
Two instances of blue light in the first coin toss scene
Two descriptions of Chigurh's blue eyes (no one else's eyes have colors in the book)
A few others (mostly objects)

So I have no idea how much symbolism is really there but I don't think the instance of environmental blue and yellow light are a coincidence

[Anonymous No.5283352]

>>5282149
Something something Byrons Darkness.

[Anonymous No.5283354]

>>5282913
Read the whole book. His writing style drives home the setting and themes. It's bleak as fuck.

[Anonymous No.5283414]

>>5282149
The state of the world is bleak. It has always been like this but humanity didnt understand that in the past, and hid it behind things. Now there is nothing else to hide behind. The worst of the worst is here, that everything will die and wont come back. He tries to extend this as far as possible, to make it as bleak as possible.

This is made to contrast with something else, in order to engage the reader. Its probably the only thing this book sets out to do.

Who will carry the fire? Will the boy? Even though everything is as bad as it is, in the end, with the boy going off with the stranger , do you have faith that the boy will live, that he will carry the fire?

If you believe he wont, then he wont. If you believe he will, then he will, because the reader is the boy, and the book is asking you, will you believe, will you carry the fire?

Shit book, though I respect it.

[Anonymous No.5283539]

>>5283414
solid analysis bro