Why is the Road Rat's character so explicit whilst the man is so implicit?

The man's character is implicit to represent how the man tries to cut himself from his humanity so detatches from any personality or human part of himself in order to survive and not be repressed by any personal preferences/opinions etc. This separates the man (and the boy) from the other characters in The Road and expresses how they are different from them.

On the other hand the character of the Road Rat is made so explicit as to attach the events of The Road to a world forgotten to the characters and connect to American culture. The Road Rat is described as 'lean, wiry, rachitic' and 'dressed in a pair of filthy blur coveralls and a black billcap' which characterises him as a stereotypical 'redneck' character which connects The Road to a key feature in typical American culture (a 'redneck' being the stereotyped image of an American). This means that by featuring this redneck character McCarthy is mythologising the past and combining the world of The Road to the lost world destroyed by the nuclear blasts.

Moments of Rich Lyricism

"And the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you? Waking in the cold dawn it all turned to ash instantly. Like certain ancient frescoes entombed for centuries suddenly exposed to the day."


"Ash moving over the road and the sagging hand of blind wire strung from the black-ended lightpoles whining thinly in the wind."


"Wrapped in the blankets, watching the nameless dark come to enshroud them."


"The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void."


"Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must."

A Limited Palette

The death of everything living – plants, trees, creatures and most other human beings – is evoked through the bleakness and ‘deadness’ of the language.

"The road was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay?"

"Sketched upon the pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim."

There is a powerfully poetic effect in the simplicity of the language. By avoiding rhetorical flourishes and elaborate language the writer makes a stronger impact.

"Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast."

"Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again."

Avoiding emotional language and keeping it simple makes the narrative all the more emotionally engaging.

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

"When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again."

How does McCarthy tell the story in pages 1-28 of The Road?

The Road begins in medias res as the man reaches out to touch the boy sleeping beside him after waking up himself from a nightmare. In the first twenty eight pages the man and boy continue their journey to the south and we are introduced to McCarthy's interesting though unconventional style of writing; complex lexis such as 'glaucoma' mixed in with the otherwise basic language, an absence of speech marks or punctuation in general. We are brought into the world in The Road, where it is made obvious some kind of apocalypse has devastated humanity and an ashen wasteland is all that's left; McCarthy emphasises the desolation of the survivors with the characterisation of the man and by contrasting this with his memories of his old life and with the characterisation of the boy.

The setting in The Road is described in 'Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before.' which suggests that the world is slowly dimming, fading away as the light diminishes. This gives us the imagery of the world growing darker by the day, implying that it is getting harder and harder for the man and boy to navigate and that it's not a place fit for human life; this helps to tell the story of the disintegration of civilisation and fits the novel into the post-apocalyptic genre. More importantly, this representation of the world is contrasted with the world that we live in in these first twenty eight  pages with the first can of Cola. The man finds a Coca-Cola in an upturned vending machine -'He withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola.'-  and gives it to the boy to drink/ This signifies the disintegration of a consumer-capitalist society. The boy's fascination and awe of the taste of the cola forms a 'golden', idealised vision of the old world; the can of coke therefore symbolises the idealised perception of the old world that the boy has, believing the can to be pure and untouched by the apocalypse. The contrast between the world the man and boy live in and the world the boy is imagining emphasises the degree of destruction and corruption in The Road, making it seem darker in comparison therefore helping to explain the story of disintegration of society and destruction of the world in The Road. 

The theme of spirituality in The Road is brought in on the first page in the man's dream where 'he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand.'. We are shown that the boy is taking the man on a religious journey in 'Like pilgrims' and that the boy is leading him to death, where the man can't take the boy. This gives us a key characterisation of the man by explaining his inability to relieve the boy of this life by killing him which is referred to throughout the novel and how the man chastises himself for this, seeing himself as weak. This also explains the feeling that death never ends in their world, suggesting that the survivors of the apocalypse live with death as a companion in day to day life. This dream is significant in the story of The Road as it explains how the man views death in The Road as something that cannot be his but what he wants. He describes his dreams as 'rich in colour' which suggests that the dreams are 'rich' and enticing to him, showing that he wishes for death, but that he resists that temptation until the conclusion of the book where he finally dies. Then the man dreams that he finally reaches the end of the cave that appears in this first dream, explaining how the man has accepted him inevitable death and that he has moved past life into death and let go. This is significant because it explains the representation of the relationship of the characters with death in The Road and how that death is viewed a gift rather than a fear. 

In these first pages we are introduced to the strange relationship between the man and the boy. Their relationship is not what you would expect of a father and son and is best explained in the first section of dialogue 'I'm right here. I know.' which sets conversation style for the rest of the novel.The boy's reply 'I know.' expresses that the relationship between the two is distant but that he always present to the boy. This represents how the man lingers in the presence of the boys life, always there but never close to him because of the man himself. It is shown in 'If only my heart were stone' that this is a deliberate action of the man because he is trying to disconnect himself from his humanity on order to survive as he sees fit, and look after the boy. This presents us with the irony of this because the man is trying to rid himself of his humanity in order to look after the boy, showing that his humanity will always be intact because his relationship with the boy and that he will never succeed in getting rid of his humanity for the boy because of his love the boy. This sets us the relationship between the man and the boy and tells the story of their complex relationship.

Post-Apocalyptic Literature

Marauding Gangs of Bandits

The Gang of Road-Rats

'He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had 
the tattoo of a bird done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance.'
The gang of road rats represents the degree of the corruption and disintegration of society in The Road. This is a key concept which links to Post-Apocalyptic literature as it brings in the theme of violence to the novel whilst also setting the defining lines between the 'good guys' and the 'bad guys'. This section also gives us a key characterisation of the man by hinting at a background that involved these kind of dangerous situations on a regular basis.

The Gang in Haz-mats Suits

'An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. (. . .) The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. (. . .) Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illcothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. All passed on. They lay listening.'
This gang brings in a much more sinister theme to the novel and embodies what the man and boy call 'the bad guys' because this gang stand for the degradation of humanity in The Road. The 'dogcollars' represent the dehumanisation of the people being treated like slaves and speaks volumes about the degradation in this novels by the way these people are being treated like animals. This corruption, degradation and dehumanisation makes the novel fit into the post-apocalyptic literature genre as it represents how survival turns humanity savage and allows them to regress back to primitive behaviour without feeling any moral issues with the acts they are carrying out, because they think they are doing it to survive.

The Woman

Memories of the woman always surface in 'The Road'  when the man feels that he and the boy are close to death which speaks volumes about the role that she plays in the novel and what she represents as a character. Before she commits suicide we are presented with the woman's unique relationship with death. From the beginning of the apocalypse death becomes a companion that survivors live with, but rather than the hatred and grief that is usually regarded to with death, the woman begins to feel for death what she feels for her husband. Her love and hope for death grows day by day of survival eventually becoming as strong as her love for the man, overcoming it; as the man is her primary reason for survival this means that she hasn't got anything to live for anymore when death seems so close and comforting to her. This relationship with death explains her regarding her heart as 'whorish' and death as a 'lover' because she feels like each day she lives with death she is cheating on her husband; she become torn between her want for death and her love for the man and the boy.

It is known from one of the first mention of the woman that she will not survive the apocalypse because she doesn't understand survival. From the beginning of the apocalypse when the man fills the bath it it made clear that she doesn't understand what he is doing and why ('why are you taking a bath?') which suggests that she doesn't understand survival, foreshadowing how she ends up killing herself. Furthermore, her reasons for survival are shown not to be strong enough to keep her alive. She says 'you won't survive for yourself' implying that the man will never stay alive for himself but for somebody else (the boy). Whilst this is a stab in the gut for the man - as the woman is telling him that he and the boy are not a good enough reason for her- this suggests that the woman is not cut out for survival; that she is weak and cold. However she is strong-willed, as she finally decides that she will kill herself and be done, not allowing for any persuasion from the man or any temptation into living. This shows the difference in character of the man and the woman as throughout the novel the man is tempted by death, in his dreams and in his thoughts, whilst on the other hand the woman here is presented to be tempted by life and living.

In all but one of the memories of the woman she is described using a lexicon of ice and cold which creates the impression of the woman being coldhearted in contrast to the heat and warmth that a love would usually be described with. The semantic field that these words create connotes a cold, icy and sharp characterisation, contrasted with the heat and fire that destroyed the world. This gives the impression that the fires turned the woman cold, foreshadowing that she will not survive the apocalypse because as she represents ice, the fire that burnt the world will melt the ice. Adding to this, in the woman's end the man describes 'she was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift' which suggests that she teaches the man to abandon his humanity as she gives him a reason to hare and let go; a reason to darken his beautiful memories of her and forever forget his past, because the man feels that his memories are holding him back from survival. His resist of memories brings the impression that this is not the time for living, but the time for surviving because the world he's remembering, the world in his memories don't belong here with him.

Post-Apocalyptic Literature

The Thoughts and Actions of Survivors are what counts

Leaving the Thief to Die

'I wasn't going to kill him, he said...But we did kill him.'
This act of taking all of the Thief's belongings after he robbed them shows the decaying of moral standards and the disintegration of society, as although the Thief did steal the man and boy's things, the punishment the man dealt him far outweighs the crime. Yes, the man didn't kill him but the act of killing someone as retribution doesn't have the same standards in the world of The Road, as due to the state of the Earth dying is no longer feared or mourned, but rather seen as relief and salvation. No, the punishment the man deals out is harsher because by taking all of the thief's things he is leaving him exposed and vulnerable to the dangers of the cold, the gangs, starvation etc; he is leaving him to die a slow, painful death. However, if it wasn't for the boy, the man probably would have killed the man outright which tells us that the man's humanity is still intact (though barely) and it appears that the man didn't leave the man there with the intention that he will die, the leaving of his clothes proves that. This gives us the characterisation of the boy as more than a survivor because in this act (and throughout The Road) the boy expresses emotion freely and empathises with the people he meets, wanting to help them in any way he can; the boy is more than survivor because he is still in touch with his humanity, his emotions and compassion; leading us to believe that there is a significant difference in The Road between a survivor and a human. The boy convinces the man, by his grief for the thief that they effectively killed, to give the thief a chance to survive by leaving his clothes on the road for him to find, showing the difference between the man and the boy, between survivor and human.

Ely

'where men can't live gods fare no better.'

The thoughts of the character Ely, whom the man and the boy meet past midway in The Road, embodies the survivor and represents the overall state of the world in the novel. Ely's thoughts of the world being without God suggest a world without morals or hope; the dissolution of society and morals in the world of The Road. Ely shows this absence of morality or hope that embodies the survivors in this world.

'Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it'

This quote expresses the mentality of the survivors in The Road and their attitude to the world that they live in and how it seems like the time and world in which they're living is not theirs anymore and won't be theirs for long; even their own eyes seem 'borrowed' as it seems like each moment they live is evanescent. In whole this quote represents how the survivors feel like they live on 'borrowed time' because they could die at any moment and that they shouldn't exist as they don't belong there anymore.

The Man Struck by Lightning 

'no. We cant help him. There's nothing to be done.'
That fact that the only thing the man and boy can do for the man is leave him to die represents that the world cannot be saved or even helped, but just left to die slowly without even comfort or mourning. This represents to hopelessness of the world and the destruction of humanity in the survivors left on the planet.