Kerry reviewed on
Helpful Score: 3
A post-cataclysmic world, dark and raw, reduces humans to simple forage eating. Father and son walk an old state highway through nature destroyed seeking what was lost. We see violence. Urges for dominance/control reign due to scarcity of resources.
Important is the father's need to define and maintain for his son a sense of what is the transcending good. Especially now, evil and cruelty are pervasive in the surrounding world; a fallen society seems to say all things are relative and only a matter of immediate necessity.
In this respect, McCarthy's father/son dynamic works to show the anxiety any father might feel in preparing his son for all unknowns of a quickly changing world. Guidance is especially needed in this post-apocalypse world because society is no more. The father has only so much time to prepare his son; childhood innocence is fleeting, failure means destruction; and the son needs hope.
Against all reason and despite the odds, will these lost souls still find some hope for the future?
As others mention, story does not really have a plot to give away, it lacks closure, and we never learn what causes the disaster. But that does not mean THE ROAD is without merit, the story's experience is in the journey of McCarthy's prose and not the ending.
Important is the father's need to define and maintain for his son a sense of what is the transcending good. Especially now, evil and cruelty are pervasive in the surrounding world; a fallen society seems to say all things are relative and only a matter of immediate necessity.
In this respect, McCarthy's father/son dynamic works to show the anxiety any father might feel in preparing his son for all unknowns of a quickly changing world. Guidance is especially needed in this post-apocalypse world because society is no more. The father has only so much time to prepare his son; childhood innocence is fleeting, failure means destruction; and the son needs hope.
Against all reason and despite the odds, will these lost souls still find some hope for the future?
As others mention, story does not really have a plot to give away, it lacks closure, and we never learn what causes the disaster. But that does not mean THE ROAD is without merit, the story's experience is in the journey of McCarthy's prose and not the ending.
