THE ROAD || Book Review

My review of The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The Road is certainly one of the darkest books I have had the pleasure of reading. A world is built that is not only dark and disturbing, but gritty and feels real on a bothersome level. 10/10 need to shower after the basement scene.

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[DanielGreeneReviews]

So what’s the darkest book you’ve ever read? 🤔

[bigfat]

I kinda disagree. It's obviously a book about misery and suffering, but i felt like it was a story about love and kindness in the face of it all. The father son dynamic is often so intensely sweet and you can feel how much they love each other and how important it is to the father that the son does lose that feeling or "fire". It's a very sappy reading, especially for a cormac book, but I think its a correct one

[someokiedude]

I have to say that I think the opposite of The Road. The Road is about having hope even in the most desperate of times, as well as the battle between hope and despair. McCarthy has a habit of raising genre books into a higher level, like with authors such as Chabon, Pynchon, Lethem, or Murakami, as well as sharing their tendencies of combining genre conventions and 'literary' conventions in order to try something new, and it's something that I think that McCarthy does exceptionally well.

For a book that was written on a whim, according to McCarthy, this is a masterfully crafted piece.

[DanielGreeneReviews]

Want to clarify! When I mean monsters, I mean in terms of monstrous people. Not literal monsters. Though people can be literal monsters. You know what I mean!

[WolfyTheIn-between]

I felt the ending of the road was hopeful and beautiful, because despite the end of everything there is the goodness of the child carrying on...even if humanity is doomed there is the light in him. It gives meaning to life even in misery. But yeah the world is fucked lol.

[jeffbezos]

In my opinion, 5 years past you reviewed it…the most important part of the ending is that the boy spent the entire book saying he wished he were dead. At the end, he’s left alone with a gun with one bullet. For three days, he doesn’t use it and on the third day, he finds a new group with kids, the first glimpse of light he’s seen since they helped the old man for a night. It shows that he learned to believe that life was worth living despite the bleakness of reality. That’s the beauty of it.

[devildriverrule]

It's not that I didn't understand 'The Road', or that the internet has destroyed me. It's just that books like 'This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen', 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich', 'The Forgotten Soldier', 'All Quiet on the Western Front' and 'Storm of Steel', had already given me what 'The Road' does.

Sure for a literary work, it is very dark, it is harsh, it is violent, much like his other novel Blood Meridian (a better book I feel) but to me, reality always hits me a lot harder than fiction. If it is your first journey into a novel or a world that dark I am sure it is a harsh rough experience, but after a few, and ones based in reality, it isn't as effective on you.

[elsad]

I would actually disagree somewhat with an aspect of your assertion. I think The Road is a bit ambiguous, but with the question "Is the struggle worth it?", I think there's two general arguments present: Ely's nihilism, and the father and son's "fire".
It's dark and desperate and endless, yes, but it's the boy's goodness, the virtue they keep, the kindness and companionship they share with each other, that makes the struggle worth it. I found their relationship heartfelt, even if you know from early on the man will die.
The characters and their relationship are very archetypal and heartfelt. The boy is the picture of innocence and his father is a good dad who will do anything to protect his son. Like the line at the beginning, they are each the other's world. In my opinion, that's all that can matter, so it should matter, and their struggle is meaningful even without an end goal. I don't know, I guess I just had a more optimistic view.

[kilmartin]

Great review. Personally, i love 'The Road', I found McCarthy's writing style did an amazing job of maintaining a heightened sense of fear and anxiety for the reader throughout the story.
"Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease." also for me, this line in the opening page is one of the greatest I've ever read.

[LauraFreyReadinginBed]

Read this book yesterday and have been trying to tell myself it has a happy ending, so I don't go fully into a depressive state!! :) I agree though, the boy's prospects are not good given what we know about this world - in particular, that this apocalypse has wiped out not only most humans, but most everything. No plants, no animals, no way to rebuild. But that very last paragraph mentions a fish, so like, maybe there is something out there? The father says the boy is lucky. Let me hang on to that :)

[millervickery]

I think the ending did symbolize hope. From just the short encounter with the new man he seems more “equipped” to take on the road compared to Dad. Yeah the boy will continue on the road living the same way but there’s more people in his new family. There is strength in numbers. Also towards the end it seemed to me the boy was starting to “grow a pair” knowing his dad was sick. The boy will mature and be able to handle himself having learned from two men good at surviving.

[UltimatusPictures]

Absolutely ended on a hopeful note. The story was a heartfelt exploration of a father's love for his son. The backdrop was the bleak stuff lol

[hailthechief]

One of the aspects as to how this book was written that captured me and added so much to it was that there were no chapters. No cliffhangers, no stopping points besides paragraphs, it was just a long road that ends in a fork in the road, taking the boy to a new path that we can only imagine would be just as grim as where he came from. I first read that book the year it came out, I still have it, have not reread it, but I remember the entire book and ending as being bleak and shadowed in constant fear and despair.

Wasn't there something towards the end when his father was dying that he told his boy to keep the fire alive within him? That is the most hopeful thing in the book, that maybe because of the boy's determination, and because he now knows what to look out for and how to protect himself, he then becomes the Gunslinger, goes to the Dark Tower, and fights the man in black in order to reclaim the world.

[supercool]

You should now play the last of us. It has taken some inspiration from the book

[punypunic]

The basement scene.... never forget the basement scene...

[wymeck]

I interpreted the book differently than you did. While it is certainly dark I thought the theme was the enduring bond between a father and his son. No matter how awful the world got the bond between the the man and the boy never failed. Even at the end the man tells the boy to talk to him always even after he’s gone. To me this signified a father letting go of his son, he’d taught him everything he could and it was time to let him go on his own, always remembering the lessons his father had taught him. I know it’s odd but the book has a sense of hope and sweetness to me. Through the worst of humanity there will always be a little light.

[kingjames]

The Road is about doing what is right, even when you will receive nothing but pain and misery in life for doing so. If all you have is a materialistic, hedonistic view of life, then of course The Road would come across as nothing but despair. If you have a moralistic, religious, or ascetic view of life, it comes across as the opposite.

[monsouranda]

The movie adaptation of this is probably the best post apocalyptic scenario I ever seen. I only watch this once but it stuck on my mind until to this day.

[arsalanmohammadi]

The only book that they made us read in High School and I absolutely loved!!!!

[Zilla_Advocate]

Have you watched the movie adaptation of the book, if so what’s your opinion on it? Great review btw.