Jacob

Jacob Huynh The Road   by: Cormac McCarthy

**__About the book __** The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, was published in March 2007 by Vintage Books. The book takes place in post-apocalyptic America after an untold catastrophe occurs. The basic plot to The Road is about to people, a father and a son, who are trying to survive and head south hoping to find a place where others are alive.

__**About the author **__ Cormac McCarthy was born on July 20th, 1933 in Providence Road Island. He is the third of six children born to Charles Joseph and Gladys Christina McGrail McCarthy. McCarthy was originally named Charles, but he changed it later an Irish King. After high school, he attended the University of Tennessee. He then served in the U.S. Air Force for four years. McCarthy’s first novel was The Orchard Keeper (1965). It won a Faulkner Award, and the grants allowed him to continue writing. He has written a total of ten novels, one screenplay, and two plays. His most recent novel, The Road (2006), won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. McCarthy is best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, All the Pretty Horses (1992).




 * __Characters and Conflict __**[[image:http://cache.io9.com/assets/images/io9/2008/08/road4.jpg width="492" height="346" align="right"]]

There are two main characters in the novel The Road. The first is the man. He is unnamed in the story and he is faced with keeping his son alive after the apocalypse. The second character is the boy, who is also unnamed. He is the other character’s son and was born a little before the catastrophe. He travels with his father and is trying to survive each day with his father’s guidance. They are both faced with different obstacles throughout the story including running into people who try to kill them and nearly starving and freezing to death.

__**Review **__ The Road, by Cormac McCarthy, is a novel about a man and his son’s journey through a post apocalyptic America. Throughout the story, the two are faced with obstacles such as groups of people who are trying to kill or eat them, starvation, and freezing nearly all of the time. In my opinion, The Road is an excellent and exciting book. It creates a clear and vivid picture in your mind of the destroyed world, and, although slow at times, has very thrilling moments throughout the novel. I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a good and interesting read.

Thoughts of the past during harsh events create a sense of hope and happiness to keep one going, but will also distract one from his or her goal or mission, resulting in a lack of concentration and failure.
 * __Theme __**

__**Style Analysis **__ The setting of a post-apocalyptic America, sets the foundation for Cormac McCarthy's clever use of diction to describe the harsh and barren environment. He also uses a unique sense of sentence structure that displays both the seimplicity of writing while incorporating the significance of more complex writing. Cormac McCarthy's simplicity of writing and brilliant diction creates his unique style of writing and can be viewed throughout his novel, The Road.

McCarthy's sentence structure includes the simple and short sentences that have a noticeable lack of punctuation such as commas and quotations.
 * "Though the sentences of McCarthy's recent work are shorter and simpler than they once were, his prose combines the cadence of prophecy with the indelible images of poetry" ("The Road")
 * "With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studies the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calender for years. they were moving south. there'd be no surbibing another winter here." (McCarthy, 4)
 * "Dialog is delivered in short, declarative sentences and is not announced by quotations or dashes. Often McCarthy dives into the father's head for brief spurts of thought." ("//The Road// by Cormac McCarthy")
 * "He woke in the night an lay listening. He couldnt remember where he was. The thought made him smile. Where are we? he said." (McCarthy, 83)

His use of diction in //The Road//, creates the somber and downcast atmosphere of the post-apocalyptic world, making a sad circumstance into a despairing, heartbreaking occasion.
 * "These horrors would be considerably less potent in the hands of a lesser writer, but McCarthy's peculiar imagination know just what details will deliver the goods." ("//The Road// by Cormac McCarthy")
 * "Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands. On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the him and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous. - Jesus, he whispered. - Then one by one they urned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us." (McCarthy, 110)

= The Road - Official Trailer [HD] =

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__**Works Cited **__

Maslin, Janet. “The Road Through Hell, Paved with Desperation.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, 2006. Web. 17 May 2012. <__http://www.nytimes.com /2006/09/25/books/25masl.html__>.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, 2006. Print.

“The Road.” Rev. of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy Kirkus Reviews. Kirkus Reviews, 2012. Web. <__http://www.nytimes.com/2006 /09/25/books/25masl.html__>.

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 120%;"> “//The Road// by Cormac McCarthy.” Rev. of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The Quarterly Conversation. Scott Esposito, 2008. Web. <__http://quarterlyconversation.com/the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy-review__>.