The Road by Cormac McCarthy

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Description

The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy - the tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months, across a landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed all civilization and, apparently, most life on earth. The novel was awarded the... read more

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Summary

The Road follows an unnamed father and son journeying together toward the sea for many months across a post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a great, unexplained cataclysm. It is revealed via flashback that the boy's mother, pregnant at the time of the disaster, committed suicide after... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

Cast of Characters/Important People

The Man/Papa: The main protagonist who is traveling with his son toward the coast as they try to survive amidst starvation, the weather, and human predators.
The Boy: An innocent boy born into the apocalyptic world who's only protection is his father, "Papa", with whom he travels.
The Mother: The Boy's mother who is not actually living contemporary to the story but is only remembered in flashbacks.

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Memorable Quotes

“He thought if he lived long enough the world at last would be lost. Like the dying world the newly blind inhabit, all of it slowly fading from memory.”
“He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of floating cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small penknife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.”
“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
“You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget”
Papa
“...Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.”
“If you break little promises you'll break big ones. That's what you said.”
The Boy
“So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.”
Papa
“If trouble comes when you least expect it then maybe the thing to do is to always expect it.”
Papa
“Beggars cant be choosers... that would be asking too much.”
“The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it.”
“Years later he’d stood in the charred ruins of a library where blackened books lay in pools of water. Shelves tipped over. Some rage at the lies arranged in their thousands row on row. He picked up one the books and thumbed through the heavy bloated pages. He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation. He let the book fall and took a last look around and made his way out into the cold gray light.”

First Sentence

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

One of the unusual things about this book is there are no chapters. An additional space between paragraphs is all that signals moving on to another scene.