Emotionally Bonded

While reading The Road it is extremely hard not to imagine what would one feel, what would one do if you were in that extreme situation. One is immersed in the descriptions of day by day life, just how McCarthy wants us to read it, to understand, to feel, to experience the horror. As the two individuals see a corpse in the street, the son asks his dad: “You forget some things, dont you? Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget” (McCarthy, 6). It must definitely be hard to live in a world, knowing that somebody depends completely on you, being chased by others for food, and still have faith in what you knew, in what was, in what you think it should be. Not knowing if you will have enough food to survive another day, or even not have enough bullets to kill yourself! In the first pages of The Road we can see how memories and the past makes the father fight another day for him and his son to survive, knowing that it is harder to remember what it was than to forget what you don’t want to remember.

McCarthy shows glimpses of what the adult’s childhood and previous life was, emotionally compromising us with the text, obligating us to feel what is happening, bonding us with the characters. As the narrator describes a day of the father’s childhood with his uncle he concludes that “This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon” (McCarthy, 7). Definitely somebody who has lost it all except for his faith in the future must have to be mentally able to affront daily difficulties, one must find something to stick to, to be able to hope, have faith, wake up and fight. McCarthy occasionally uses these flashbacks of the protagonist’s life in order to remind us that these really are human beings, a tiny family struggling to survive.

As father and son reach the adult’s former home, McCarthy describes how his bedroom, his closet was, as the narrator states: “In the nights in their thousands to dream the dreams of a child's imaginings, worlds rich or fearful such as might offer themselves but never the one to be. He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things. Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart" (McCarthy, 13). The characterization of the two individuals is given to us through their decisions and their feelings, it is very strange for the narrator to intervene in this way, literally telling us how he is. This description of the protagonist’s soul is very interesting given that the color of the light and his heart, gray, would necessarily imply a mix of black and white, pessimism and hope, death and life, good and evil. Due to the descriptions, the attention to detail and the memories the narrator and the conversations between father and son, we are bonded with the story, with the characters and the tragically deep situation.