Remembering, Yet Creating

In The Road, McCarthy employs different techniques to involve past, present and future with the characters, thus capturing the essence of the plot with more vivid detail. Through his narrator, the author is able to make conclusions of what the characters are feeling, as when he includes a reflection of what memories are for the father, stating that: “He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not” (McCarthy, 67). I find it extremely interesting how remembering, the past, is so important for the characters given the circumstances they are living in. In repeated occasions we find the adult wondering how to describe how the world was to his son, something that makes me think about how everything we do, the choices we make will be shown in history. Definitely there is something violent in remembering, in the altering of what was, to be able to share it, in tying it up with words and limiting it to the wish of the individual. How many times have we heard someone telling an event we were witness to and thinking that wasn’t like that?

The narrator is able to capture what is happening through the feelings of the characters and the conclusions of its essence, as seen when he describes how “somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it” (McCarthy, 67). The precarious situation of McCarthy’s characters are represented by their relationship with the surroundings, in the feeling of only being able to borrow the time, world and eyes to sorrow about what is happening, in a certain voyeuristic way you are able to do so. The impossibility of the characters of reflecting on what has happened, constantly being on the run, unable to sit down and think, makes us their judges, acting as their minds to make opinions about their decisions and what is happening around them.

McCarthy experiments with the words, the commas and specially the apostrophes to indicate interesting elements of the content of his novel. The narrator describes how “There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasnt about death. He wasnt sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness. Things that he'd no longer any way to think about at all” (McCarthy, 66). In this description, the author is able to make us understand how different it now was for the father to feel about what was happening, how different is the reason for which he is crying than the one that the reader would think. More than that, McCarthy is able to experiment with the missing apostrophe in the word wasn’t, probably reflecting the new world idea, the concept of needed invention in his writing. The reality of lacking everything being the constant. The possibility of understanding and appreciating more than one perception of the story, the past, present and future of the characters enriches the content of the story, helping the author win his readers’ thoughts about his novel.