This document provides a book report summary of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel "The Road". It summarizes that the story is set in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world and follows a man and his young son as they travel south trying to survive. It notes that the novel has a depressing tone and uses a fragmented simple writing style without quotation marks. The document also discusses McCarthy's background and style, as well as some of the novel's themes around survival in a desolate world and maintaining one's humanity.

1. The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Book Report
Matthew McNiece
WRI 111 – Dr. B. – Fall 2013

2. What is The Road?
• Set in post-apocalyptic world
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Assumed to be US because of “state roads”
• Tells story of a man and his son trying to survive
• Boy grows throughout novel
• Pretty Depressing/Sad

3. Style Makes it Special
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Fragmented and simple sentences
No use of quotation marks
World is (mostly) gray
Dialogue created with new lines
Let’s take a look.
Its’s really scary, Papa.
There’s no one here. It’s okay. (McCarthy 198)

4. Figurative Language and Imagery
• Most Striking Literary Feature
• Frequent when:
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Describing surroundings
Dreams
Opening and Closing Scene
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Opening Paragraph
Alt Link

5. Cormac McCarthy
• Born 1933
• American
• Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Western, Southern Gothic
• Pulitzer Prize for The Road
• 2 sons, book is dedicated to one of them

6. Apocalypse How?
• Post-Apocalyptic
• No explicit reference to cause of apocalypse
• Survival, travel, and death

7. Selected Quotes
“Are we still the good guys? He said.
Yes. We’re still the good guys.
And we always will be.
Yes. We always will be.
Okay.” (McCarthy 77)
• Repeated Mantra
• Boy’s favorite word

8. Selected Quotes Part II
• Context: Man and boy are nearly starving, smell something cooking at a
camp and walk in to find it abandoned.
They walked into the little clearing, the boy clutching his hand. They’d taken
everything with them except whatever black thing was skewered over the
coals. He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned
around and buried his face against him…What the boy had seen was a charred
human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. (McCarthy 198)

9. Potential Ethical Issues
• “Good Guys”
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What defines a “good guy”
Scavenging, stealing, violence, don’t trust others
Scope is reduced because of lack of interaction
Boy becomes source of ethics (Latz)

10. Recommendation
• Yes, as long as you
can bear a sad story,
with some light at
points.

11. Works Cited
Latz, Andrew B. "Beyond Unknowing." Beyond Unknowing. N.p., 10 Jan. 2010.
Web. 13 Nov. 2013.
<http://beyondunknowing.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/the-road-ethics-ina-situation-of-scarcity/>.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Print.