"This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. Canned hams. Corned beef.

Are we still the good guys, he said.

We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didn't.

The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.

Okay? Okay.

They sat on the edge of the tub and pulled their shoes on and them he handed the boy the pan and soap and he took the stove and the little bottle of gas and the pistol and wrapped in their blankets and they went back across the yard to the bunker.

Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth.

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift."


These extracts from The Road gives insight into the dysptopian genre by the style of writing. The style -whilst conforming to the spelling and general language conventions- abstains from the use of punctuation like speech marks, this removes the emotion from the speech and gives the impression of being removed from the normal conventions of humanity. This slight contortion reflects the events in The Road and how society has been deformed and destroyed, how life still continued for humanity but never in the same way.


The structure of 'Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. Canned hams. Corned beef.' is constructed in a way to give the sentence the sound of a list being checked of and the appearance of routine. The short plosives reflect how the story continues in The Road, their lives revolving around their one constant ambition to find food and just get through the next day and give a dissociated, mundane impression of living just to get by.


The description of the bottle of gas and the pistol wrapped in the blanket helps to tell the story of the father trying to shield the boy from the death and fire surrounding them despite living in it's destruction daily. The blanket represents the comfort the father is still trying to give to his son and by wrapping the bottle of gas (representing fire) and pistol (representing death) in it we are presented with the image of two cold, heavy objects encompassed by a thin, soft blanket. This implies the weakness and frailty of the father's comfort to the boy and how it is so easily to be broken and for the objects to fall out. However these objects could also be seen to represent the father and the boy in personality. The father is characterised as having accepted this way of life and the destruction and death he had been forced to comply to, whilst the boy still doesn't understand this life; why there is destruction, why they must kill and abandon other people, and why some people are bad. This tells us what is going to happen in the story, that the boy learns about the world around him and accepts that sometimes they must leave and/or kill other people.