Manjo Gabor Gabor itibaren Frankowo, Polonya itibaren Frankowo, Polonya

“Barren, silent, godless.” Such broken and melancholy imagery, evoked on the second page of this quietly dark novel, aptly describes the post-apocalyptic world that is the centerpiece to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” The novel, and the cauterized earth on which it takes place, is defined by such fragmentary diction and structure. No chapters divide the trudge through the murk, and between every few paragraphs is a break, signifying a change in scene, tone, or mood. Those changes never shift out of the mode of despair and darkness however, nor does the pace ever depart from the step-by-step rhythm engendered by both structure and plot. The narrative follows a man and his son, on their journey from the interior of the blasted United States to the coast. Both remain unnamed throughout the course of “The Road,” the titles of humans dissipating as “[t]he names of things slowly fading into oblivion.” They are the self-described “good guys” in a world overrun by evil. Bloodcults, murderous cannibals hell-bent on survival, roam in terrifying numbers, and even the seemingly innocent are more likely to consume the boy and his father than assist them. So on they step, along a cracked interstate road, day by day fighting off death. McCarthy centers his pen on the daily struggles to survive in the manmade hell that earth has become (the novel implies that nuclear war darkened the skies and blackened the trees, and the eternal cold whispers of nuclear winter), each toil mapped out to the fullest and each action described in detail. Rarely does McCarthy spend time ruminating upon the loss of all earthly creation, instead allowing the reader to form his or her own opinions concerning the significance of the end. When he does consider the state of things, he does so through the man, who sees the world as a loss of “things one believed to be true.” The man sees himself as an alien to the boy, the latter born into this world of darkness and ash, the former a forlorn remnant of the peace that came before. It is McCarthy’s writing that carries the novel through bleakness and despair to its inevitable end. The world he paints in ink is one of lost sentence fragments strung together to create a sense of the miasmatic life that the man and boy live—a life so devoid of simple human pleasures that only the perpetuation of self defines them as alive. Their dialogue, unfettered from quotation marks, has a silence to it, evocative of the world itself. Yet they persist, for as the man says to his son, “This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up.”