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.