I was reading an article on cracked.com about The Ten Most Important Things They Didn't Teach You in School. Lesson #1:
After reading this, I put "Read The Road" on my list of things to do at some point in time. When this assignment was given, I didn't even bother looking at the list of suggestions before illegally downloading... err, I mean "super happy file looky reading time." Though short, The Road was powerful, and I needed to curl up in a ball for an hour after reading it and sob myself to sleep. Before I delve into the details, I'd like to note here that in order to keep my sanity, I will freely interject with something cute and adorable whenever things get too depressing. Let's test it now.
Alright, let's do this
"He was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face
in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can I ask you
something? he said.
Yes. Of course.
Are we going to die?
Sometime. Not now.
And we're still going south.
Yes.
So we'll be warm.
Yes.
Okay.
Okay what?
Nothing. Just okay.
Go to sleep.
Okay.
I'm going to blow out the lamp. Is that okay?
Yes. That's okay.
And then later in the darkness: Can I ask you something?
Yes. Of course you can.
What would you do if I died?
If you died I would want to die too.
So you could be with me? Yes. So I could be with you. Okay." pg. 3"They passed through the city at noon of the day following. He kept the pistol to hand on the
folded tarp on top of the cart. He kept the boy close to his side. The city was mostly burned. No sign of
life. Cars in the street caked with ash, everything covered with ash and dust. Fossil tracks in the dried
sludge. A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day." pg. 3"They bore on south in the days and weeks to follow. Solitary and dogged. A raw hill
country. Aluminum houses. At times they could see stretches of the interstate highway below them
through the bare stands of secondgrowth timber. Cold and growing colder. Just beyond the high gap in
the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as
they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and
billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving
unseen beyond the murk." pg. 4And that's in the first four pages! I'll get the main gist out of the way here. We have "The Man" and "The Boy", survivors in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There's no edible vegetation left - Just some tumbleweeds and some branches. Pretty much every edible animal is extinct, so the only meat is HUMAN MEAT (Dun dun duuuuuuun...). The two protagonists stay away from cannibalism at all costs, meaning that there only source of food is whatever canned goods they can find in basements on their way south.
In short, we have two hungry humans being hunted by cannibals on a time limit to make it south before Winter comes and freezes them to death, leaving them to find whatever food they can in houses spread hundreds of miles apart. Sometimes, they get lucky and find a small stocked shelf, other times, they go five days without food. It's pretty hit or miss.
The writer varies in style. To illustrate the painful consolidation of time, he'll often throw something like "three days later" nonchalantly, as if nothing important happened in three days (and even then what he follows it up with is still uneventful). Other times, he'll include long portions of short dialogue between the man and his son.
The book has a giant environmental message. Though the reader is left unsure of what apocalypse actually happened, the are forced to realize that without the supportive environment that we've all learned to love and exploit, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE.
SLOWLY.
The system works.
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