The scenario is bleak: in a post-apocalyptic United States, a father with his son are pushing a grocery cart - where carry their few belongings - a silent and disturbing road bound for the coast south to escape the cold.
Broadly speaking this would be the argument of the latest novel by Cormac McCarthy: The Road (2007) won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize . Speaking of awards and to refresh her memory, not long ago film No Country for Old Men (the Latin translation of horrific No country for old man ) directed by the Cohen Brothers took the statuette for best movie just passed version of the Oscars, the which is based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy. Here is the natural replacement for Paul Auster - in the sense of boom - and who owns the Crazy secrecy that we like the American narrators, adding to JD Salinger and Thomas Pynchon who have been wiped off the map and its only connection with reality is presented as a novel.
waking in the woods in the cold and dark night had stretched out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Darkest nights that darkness and each of the days more gray than the previous day
So begins Highway, that is the atmosphere of the space found in the surviving father and son, of whom do not know their names or almost nothing of his past except the ambiguous flashback the narrator gives us the possible suicide of the mother and wife of our protagonists, the not be able to withstand the wasteland that has become their home.
This eventually remember we used to calculate the civilized world has been extinct for 10 years - since the child was born a little before that - have died most people, it rains non-stop - a temporary grayer than ever to become extinct any kind of animal or plant that we knew. The secrecy of the narrator gives us little or nothing about the reason that the world has ended, although there are some lights that could have been a nuclear holocaust. For what they hoped a novel full of zombies and aliens, like any Holocaust as seen by Hollywood - forget it, on Highway see only ordinary humans - like you and me - who practice cannibalism to avoid starvation in a world that, honestly, and not worth it survive.
The cards are on the table: the minimum amount of information received from the narrator, we have only scratched the surface and depend on us-as readers-build, interpret and speculate what it hides McCarthy.
Now we join with the couple of players in their journey to the coast, we know what is the reason that motivates him to go there Will you still hope? He has already lost all hope, the only thing that motivates him to continue to survive is to protect your child from the presence of others. That becomes his main goal.
- We must move away from the road
- Why, Dad?
- Someone comes
- Are Bad?
The construction of the novel continually uses this kind of dialogue to show the interaction between father and children, and throughout the novel wears this relationship with the absence of dialogue, the end closest to the language.
Another interesting stylistic feature is the neutral narrator says in the novel, his descriptions of space or actions that are occurring are reported like reading a movie, words such as moving images.
The economy of prose McCarthy close to the minimalism of Ernest Hemingway allows us to keep an objective account, but the cold mathematics of telling not be an impediment to convey the anguish, fear, hunger and cold of the protagonists, making the reader begins to feel like them, becoming one more of the survivors.
He sat on the road at noon in the best light they would have and cut the stitches with scissors and the scissors back cabinet and pulled out tweezers. Proceeded to tear your skin small black threads, pressing with the heel toe. The boy watched him sitting on the road. The man grabbed the ends of the wires and clamps it was pulling out one by one. Blood spots. When he had finished I keep the tweezers and covered the wound with gauze and then got up and pulled his pants and handed the kit to the boy to keep it.
Thus operates the narrator worries carefully detailing all the movements of monotonous wandering of the stars with long phrases that connects through the illative "and" instead of using commas or other punctuation marks, thus allowing the narrative acquires a rhythm. This resource using McCarthy plays the role of the passage of a scene (or sequence to be precise) to one that is characteristic of cinematic storytelling, resulting in juxtaposition of images that enrich the literary narrative.
Cloths seems that has finally returned after the start. In the early days where he carries the fire has the power. Is this our fate?
The road is one of those novels that one refuses to end, dosing in fifteen-page daily readings for stay as long as possible in the stifling universe. In one way or another we as survivors, we feel special the mere fact of being there. Nobody can deny that his head has not passed the sublime fantasy of being the last man standing in what remained of the world.
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