The Road Blog

The Road by Cormac McCarthy at first was very mundane. It was difficult to read and I found it very dry, but it isn’t until you look back to you realize the beauty of it. The simplicity of it, the absolute lack of superfluous details makes it brilliant. In the book it is clearly evident that the boy and the father really love one another and that they would do anything for one another, yet in the movie, the story is extremely different.
After reading the book, I was eager to watch the movie; I was let down. When reading the book, I felt that there was more of a dependency on the father and the son. I did not get that from the movie, the two weren’t “each other’s world entirely.” Also, I always imagined the boy to be much younger than he was portrayed in the movie. One of the biggest things that makes this book successful is the relationship the father and son share, I feel like it was not achieved in the movie. Another thing that was not captured in the movie was the desperateness of the human race. The scene in the book in which a group of people eat a new born baby is significant to the picture I draw of the human race in this post apocalyptic world. I feel like that scene should have been in the movie in order to achieve that picture, but I do realize that it would be too explicit for movie goers. It is a pretty gross thing to imagine.
Another good thing about the book was the foreshadowing it had, which more often than not, come during the boy’s dreams. Firstly, in one of the boy’s dreams he talks about a wind up penguin that is walking but it is not wound up. At first, this flew right over my head but then I realized what it was. The penguin represents all the people on the road because they are moving without any fuel and without any purpose. It foreshadows what is to come for everyone in the world. Next, in another dream, the boy dreams that he is screaming in his sleep but his father does not come and get him. The father apologizes for not coming to help him when the boy explains the dream, thinking that the dream he is explaining actually happened. The boy responds by saying, no it was the dream in which I screamed in. this foreshadows the father’s death.
Overall, The Road was a very good book, but it was a bit dry in places and it seems to me that the only reason some of the interesting parts were so interesting was because they are interesting juxtaposed to the rest of the banal text. Out of all the books we have read this quarter, I would say this is my third favorite book after “We” and “1984.”