"The Road" Outside Reading

Upon finishing The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, I find it to be a very mysterious story. For starters, the story opens with a scene involving a man and his son awakening in the woods one day in a post-apocolyptic world. Throughout the story, the father and son remained unnamed, and we are never able to discover their true identities. They awaken on this morning as they have every other morning for the past few weeks as they make they way towards the western coast. They travel along a desolate highway, all the while trying to avoid being killed by the canabalistic groups that travel the road as well. They survive on sheer luck, randomly coming into unknown supplies of food that help them stay alive. Throughout their journey, McCarthy does well to illustrate the relationship between the young son and his father, which turns out to be the foundation behind the whole story. They are the only one's left that they know, and they grow in a way in which they rely completely on each other in order to survive and make it to the coast. In the end, however, the father does not make it, but he leaves his son with all the wisdom that he needs in life. After becoming ill and loosing the last remnants of strength that he had, the father lies down and gives the son their pistol, which has managed to be their lifesaver in more than one deadly encounter, and tells him that he must continue on without him and make it to the coast. With that advice, they both fall asleep, and the son wakes up to find the father cold and dead. He is nervous, but he leaves the woods where his father lies and immediately is encountered by a man on the road, and realizes that he is a "good guy" and the story ends with a woman describing how he can talk to God if he wishes, but he is only successfully able to communicate with his father.

McCarthy's style of presenting this story is unlike any that I have ever seen before. The main difference between this book and many other books is the chapterless set-up that McCarthy uses. It is a never-ending story, which in a way seems as if it was used to represent the never-ending journey that the man and his son are on. Also, the way in which McCarthy employs the dialogue in his story is unlike any other. He does not place the dialogue in quotation marks, and while it does at points make it harder to understand when a conversation has begun, it does contribute to the never-ending feeling that is created throughout the story. It seems as if he is trying to make it so that there are no pauses in the storyline, and this aspect, along with the dialogue that is used to place the reader alongside the man and his son on their journey, are effectively able to engulf the reader into the story and truly create that feeling of desperation and doubt as the journey develops. However, it seems that while McCarthy's is unlike any that I have read so far, it is truly the most effective style to portray this story.