Dream On

Throughout the book The Road, Cormac McCarthy repeatedly brings up the idea of dreams.  Dreams not only provide with details of the man and boy's past, but they also give the reader insight into how the characters currently think.

For example. through dreams, we get to see the man's pessimistic view of the world.  He says, "The right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death" (18).  He believes that since he is suffering, his dreams should be of suffering because then he won't wake up disappointed and realize how terrible his live was.

However, the man does have some pleasant dreams, particularly about his wife, the boy's mother.  These dreams are a significant contrast to the rest of the book because they make references to nature and beauty (such as "leafy canopy", "flowering wood where birds flew", and "aching blue" sky on page 18) , two things that are all but gone in the world.  These dreams, although pleasant, the man prefers not to have because they distract him from the brutal reality, which he does not want because it would only make him want to die more.

Dreams typically offer a chance to escape the reality and enter a new fictional world, but for the boy, he has never seen goodness, so he can only dream of bad things.  We hear this for the first time on page 269. when the boy says, "I don't have good dreams anyway.  They're always about something bad happening" (269).  The boy's dreams (we don't actually hear any of them specifically) show us that the reality is so bad that he can't even conceive of something good happening.  This, in a way, is a sign that he is not really human because the ability to imagine yourself in a different world is a purely human trait, and since the boy can't do that, part of his humanity is missing.

Worlds Apart

The Literal World
In Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic book The Road, he creates a world that is been burnt and completely covered with ash.  He describes the world as, "Barren, silent, godless" (4).  McCarthy uses sentence fragments like this one often to describe the world.  This to me signifies that the world is broken up, much like this sentence and many others are broken up, and all that is left is emptiness and silence.

McCarthy also tries to create an unfamiliar world by using words in ways that we're not used to hearing them.  For example, he says, "He rose and stood tottering in the cold autistic dark" (15).  Using autistic to describe the darkness is kind of a daring choice by McCarthy, but he is using it to emphasize that they are in an unpredictable world of their own.

Another way McCarthy makes the world unfamiliar to the readers is through many similes.  Most of these similes, though, make comparisons that one would not normally make.  On page 8, he says, "The shape of a city stood in the grayness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste."  The words "charcoal drawing" make us think of a gray, blurry picture smudged across paper.  Cities in our world are typically seen as the opposite--lively and beautiful, but now in McCarthy's world, even the most beautiful things have become gray, dull, and lifeless.

The Father's World
Because he's responsible for his child, the father lives very paranoid, and the world is very dangerous to him.  His child is his "warrant" (or reason, 5) for living, and his "world entire" (6).  Therefore, he does everything he can to keep them out of danger, meaning he often must ignore and run away from other people against his son's wishes.

The father's whole world was ripped away from him, and I get the feeling that he wants go too, as he always dreams about his past life and death.  However, he is now devoted to create a world for his son to live in, so he lives to teach his son how to survive and pass on his stories of the old world.

The Son's World
Having never really been exposed to the real world before the apocalypse, the son's world is mainly a construction of the man's censorship.  All he knows of the world is from what his father tells him, and his father explains things to him very trivially.  Throughout the book, the father tries to convince his son that they are the "good guys" who are "carrying the fire" and that everyone else is bad and untrustworthy.  However, the son doesn't completely buy in to what his father tells him.  He sees all people as good guys at first and wants to help them, unlike his father who does everything to avoid other people.

The boy is so "strangely untroubled" by horrific sights because he has been exposed to them so much that they have become normal (181).  Everything good has been stripped away from him, and goodness to him only exists in stories because "real life is pretty bad" (268).  That's why he so desperately wants to help other people; he wants to experience the goodness he hears about in his father's stories, but so far, everything that has happened to him has been bad, and he is accustomed to that.

The Road Section III

Questions

1.  Why is all the dialogue composed of one line sentences?
2.  Why does the man still hold on to his wallet?

Parallel

"He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and of death." (18)

"They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves." (57)

Dreams are a crucial part of the story because they become the only thing where the man can escape the reality.  However, he and his wife both say the he should be dreaming of danger.

Contrast

"The boy took his truck from the pack and shaped roads in the ash with a stick...He made truck noises." (60)

"Then he heard on the road behind him what sounded like a diesel truck." (61)

The boy plays with his toy truck, which is a symbol a innocence and is used for fun, but then a real truck comes and brings danger.