Closed The Book

And I closed the book. I have to confess I was coward enough, or brave enough, to share a tear. I am asked to blog about the book, and I’ve decided to write how I felt while reading it. I won’t talk about literary devices or figurative language or symbolism. I was touched by the book, and I think a great part of being a reader is having some kind of relationship with the book and therefore with the author. I did create a bond with the book, and that doesn’t happen often unless it is a book I decided to pick up and read and not an assignment for a class, which is what The Road was. And I will tell you why.

There are basically two characters, the man and the boy. That’s it, there are no mayor events nor complicated plots or undecipherable paradigms, but yet the simple setting is so profound (and I feel a little nerd saying this) that McCarthy’s word choice and sentence structure involves the merit of #1 National Bestseller. As a matter of fact, I decided, for the first time to read The Road while I was at the gym (I had not done that before because the gym for me it’s a time to relax and forget about school) and my trainer told me that he had slept throughout the whole movie. I tried to picture it and I guess it is very slow and boring, full of artistic shots where one flying piece of paper with the wind represents the loneliness and despair that the protagonists are experimenting, and those are the kinds of movies that few people enjoy, and I guess my trainer is right to fall asleep, he has not read the book.

Naturally while any reader reads any book, the previous knowledge and experiences start connecting automatically with the piece of text that is being read. The front cover of the book reminded me of Steve Conrad’s movie The Pursuit of Happiness (2006) which has a similar cover, a man holding hands left with a boy that appears to be his son. Going through miserable times. Yet there is not point of comparison to the level of miserable that each of them are going through. Chris Gardner (Will Smith) has a deficit of money and finds himself in bankruptcy, while The Man from The Road has a deficit of life and money doesn’t even get in the picture. But the paternal love is present and is the force that makes both the Man and Chris Gardener keep on fighting everyday, differently, but to survive. In a scene Gardener tells his son “Don’t ever let somebody tell you you can’t do something. Not even me, alright?”, in The Road, when the Man is dying they have a comparable dialogue
“I want to be with you.
You cant.
Please.
You cant. You have to carry the fire.
I don’t know how to.
Yes you do.” (pg. 278)
In different circumstances love is the key factor, as cliché as it may sound. We keep on watching, hearing, reading about love. And we will keep on knowing about it.

The next connection I made was, coincidentally, to a movie also with Will Smith, I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence) where a plague has killed all humanity and Robert Neville (Smith) is the last man on earth, with a dog. He is all alone, and scared to be attacked that is the similitude with The Road, being scared of being attacked, always paranoid and alert. There is even a dog in The Road “They listened. Then in the distance he heard a dog bark.” (pg.82) they stay with him for a while but it didn’t last long. But it is the loneliness that both the movie and the book share, alone on earth not knowing whether they would wake up the next morning. Robert is afraid of the monsters that the plague that killed everybody infected the ones that survived, and The Man is afraid of the “bad guys”.

I also compared The Road with 1984, even though in 1984 it was an absolute organized and disciplined society, they are being watched all the time by Big Brother and the protagonist, jut like the Man, wants to go against the authority that is controlling the society. The existence of greater authority or force that controls the few humans still alive in The Road is not so explicit, but there is one.
“I think we should take a look. We just have to be careful. If it’s a commune they’ll have barricades. But it may just be refugees.
Like us.
Yes. Like us.” (pg. 79)
There is a division between the “good guys” who are the characters, and the “bad guy” who is the rest, and these seem to have “barricades” that they fear. But I got the impression that these bad guys seem to have a sect, a disciplined and oppressed group of people and they have the world, or what is left of it, under their control, the control that the Man and Winston Smith (from 1984) are fleeing, scared.

But among the other few connection I made I found myself with two main factors that are repeatedly present in the novel: fear and love. These two are often linked together, more so is love and suffering, as I said when I talked about The Knight’s Tale from Canterbury’s Tales from Chaucer. And as old as Canterbury’s Tales is and as contemporary The Road is, they both are tales and both are about a journey and both talk about fear, or suffering, and love. And so does Michael Ondaatje in Coming Through Slaughter, with Buddy in love with Nora and fearing his own insanity, and so does F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby with the love triangle, or more less square, between Tom, Daisy, Gatsby and Myrtle, and the fear that Daisy and Gatsby feel about Tom and the whole thing ends up in suffering.

So the Man dies, and I cry. Because I have felt love and I have felt feel and maybe not so much suffering but something similar, and I felt sorry for the boy and I felt sorry for McCarthy for writing this story. And I felt sorry for myself because I cried reading words. Words that led me to all the connections I made and to file one more book in my brain.