Books Read This Summer:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
I have never had a book trigger my emotions as much as Cormac McCarthy's
The Road did. Weeks after finishing the book, I could still see the poor young boy crying over his father's dead body. I could never imagine losing my father in my current life, but I would have nothing if my father died in the gruesome apocalyptic world of
The Road. The boy and the father have a such an incredibly loving and important bond in the novel, leading to their survival throughout their considerably hopeless journey to the coast, and a more emotional conclusion to the story when the father dies.
A father and son always have a close bond. The father teaches the son how to play catch. The son feels an amazing amount of affection for his father. But, in
The Road, its more than learning how to play catch. The father must teach his son how to survive, while his son does whatever his father asks him to do in order to survive. Even when the boy does not want to do everything his father asks him to do, he ends up doing it. Not only to survive, but to keep his father with him, the only person who he knows and loves in his whole hell-ish world. The boy will go through anything with his father because his father is always there to assure him that everything will be okay, whether it's in the good or the bad times.
Throughout
The Road, the father and his son go through an incredible amount of experiences. Some of these experiences are terrifying and extremely gruesome showing the epitome of the apocalyptic world they live in. To make it in this ash-filled, lonely world, the two must put all of their trust into each other. When they hear the "bad people" coming down the road, the father and the boy must hide their cart and find a safe hiding place. The father is just as petrified as his son in these situations, but he keeps calm under pressure because his love for his son drives him to come through in these important situations. When the boy and the father come out of these situations unharmed and are able to find a mass amount of food and goods, it is the sweetest victory in their god forsaken world. The fact that the two make it through horrifying events together to reach the goal of finding food for themselves makes their bond even stronger. They realize that all they have is themselves and their love for each other.
When the father starts to get sick after his wound from being shot by an arrow, the future looks very grim for both himself and the boy. After reading most of the novel, I felt that if the boy lost his father, not only would it be impossible for him to survive because he would not be sure how to make it through the day in the gruesome world of
The Road, but also his reason and motivation for living would be gone: the love and connection he and his father shared on their journey. When the dad dies in the book, I felt that there was no hope left for the boy. Not only did I think he would not be able to survive, but I believed that he would not want to survive now that his dad was not on the journey with him. When the boy goes with the new man at the end of the novel, I realized that the boy would not be the same person without his father. A father can not be simply replaced by another man who wants to help a child survive. I still think of the boy walking away from his father's corpse with this new stranger, and I'm assured that he left all of his love back with his father's dead body.
