A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
Victoria - 3
Julie - 3
Stacy - 4.25
Cristen - 4
Kasie - 2
Jennifer - 3
Melanie - did not read
Gina - did not read
Regina - did not read
Questions:
- Why do you think McCarthy wrote The Road?
- Why did the father choose to survive and not the mother? What did he see that she could not?
- What do you think the coast represents (physically and literally)? Why?
- One man they meet on the road says "There is no God and we are his prophets." What does he mean by this?
- What are the key moments that help push the father to keep striving on?
- When does the boy become a man? What does he see that his father can’t?
- What do you think McCarthy is saying about humanity in The Road?
- What would you do in a world like this? Would it change your beliefs? What would you hope in?
- What do you think of the end of The Road? After such a fate, could things be "put back again?" Could they be "made right?"
- What do you think McCarthy is thinking of when he speaks of "the deep glens where all things are older than man and hum of mystery?" What does it make you think of?
