Monday, December 1, 2014
The Road pg 103-198
McCarthy's style in, The Road, is bare bones. He does not give big wordy descriptions of scenes or events that happen in the book because he is letting the reader get a feel for the sparse the world is and how father and son are using all their energy to survive. Father and son do not have the time to just sit and chat and even if they could there is not much to really talk about. On page 153 as the father wakes from a dream he thinks to himself, "Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well..." Memories of father and son are different. The father is aware of how good life was before and the son has no idea of what kind of world his father comes from. Their shared memories are dismal and bleak. The father shares very basic things with boy regarding the past because of that fact. I think McCarthy is trying to give the readers the feel for how hard it would be in that situation: fighting daily to stay alive, trying not to be seen by the "bad" guys, trying to find shelter, trying to find your way to a safe place. It is tiring and there is not much time for idle talk and talking about past memories of a better world. Are the memories really important? Does the boy need to hear any of it?
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I understand you logic in the stories filling the boy with unnecessary fantacies of the world but Ellen had some great points about the hope that they stories bring and it made me realize that they aren't just stories. They are the history of not only the world but his father, and that's important to a young boy. To understand who his father was and where he came from. His dad dies when he's so young and these stories give him a view into the world his father lived in and what helped defined who he was as a man. I think that's important. But to answer your question I do think the memories are important because they can give the boy hope for the possibilities in the new world that they have now. What it could become if enough good people cared again, but hope in a world like that is extremely important, especially to such a young mind.
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