The Road

This ain't your grandmother's road.

  • Course Length: 3 weeks
  • Course Type: Short Course
  • Category:
    • English
    • Literature
    • High School

Schools and Districts: We offer customized programs that won't break the bank. Get a quote.

Get a Quote

Get ready for a road trip, brought to you by America's favorite master of bleak violence and horror, Cormac McCarthy. In The Road, he gives us a vision of a post-apocalyptic American landscape populated by roving bands of cannibals and our two heroes: a father and son who have no plans to eat each other—or anyone else for that matter.

In this course, you'll tackle The Road from every angle in a series of Common Core-aligned activities designed to take you into the novel's thematic heart. You'll read, write, and draw your way through the novel's characters, scenes, tone, and themes. And—of course—you'll watch the movie version starring none other than Aragorn himself. In a decidedly un-Aragorn-y role.

Via all these readings and activities, you'll be able to

  • close read to your heart's content (or your stomach's tolerance for gore).
  • analyze Cormac McCarthy's inscrutable prose for symbolic and thematic meaning.
  • read a scene featuring cannibalism without throwing the book across the room in horror.
  • represent the setting of the novel in a visual piece of your own creation.
  • decipher the ending of the novel, which is easier said than done.

Unit Breakdown

1 The Road - The Road

Cormac McCarthy might not be a fan of the comma, but he sure can write a story. This 15-lesson unit will guide you down the road of The Road—just remember to bring your blankie.


Sample Lesson - Introduction

Lesson 1.01: Setting Out

The Great American Road Novel begins in...a cave. Okay, we can roll with it.
(Source)

Allow Shmoop to introduce Cormac McCarthy, one of the most important American authors of the 20th century and general expert in all things unrelentingly bleak and unforgivably violent.

Yeah, we bet you're just oh so pleased to meet him.

Sure, McCarthy may have made his name (and his literary fortune) on ultra-violent novels like Blood Meridian and Child of God, but he's also got a softer side, thanks to his cherished relationship with his young son. They say fatherhood changes a man, and, well, that's straight up true, in his case.

McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road is unrelentingly bleak and unforgivably violent, to be sure. But at its heart is the kind of father-son relationship that Alan Thicke could only dream of having with Kirk Cameron.

When The Road appeared on bookstands in 2006, critics noted the book's (expected) brutality and its (unexpected) tenderness (source). The Road simultaneously advanced McCarthy's reputation for violent, brutal writing and introduced a new depth of compassion.

Yvonne Zipp wrote the following about The Road in her Christian Science Monitor review:

The love between the father and the son is one of the most profound relationships McCarthy has ever written, and the strength of it helps raise the novel—despite considerable gore—above nihilistic horror. (Source)

To sum up: this is a novel by an American master. It has all the thrills you'd expect from a post-apocalyptic novel, a fair share of horror and gore, and an incredibly sweet relationship between a father and son.

In this lesson, we'll begin at the beginning with a healthy dose of close reading. It's always a good idea to go through the first few passages of a novel with a fine-toothed comb. It helps you suss out its themes, identify its characters, and familiarize yourself with its tone.

And that's just what we'll be doing to The Road.

 
 

Sample Lesson - Reading

Reading 1.1.01: Take to The Road

The Road gets off to a rather abrupt start, but Cormac McCarthy is never one to set you at ease. Begin at the beginning—that would be page 3 (of this version) for those of you who are counting—and read to page 22. Stop at the end of the passage that reads "Someone before him had not trusted them and in the end neither did he and he walked out with the blankets over his shoulder and they set off along the road again."

As you read, be sure to underline or make note of key passages, and circle any words you don't know (there will be a boatload).

Okay, so not a ton happens in this section. In fact, in some ways, not a lot happens in the entire book. They walk down the road, and then they walk down the road some more. Then they walk down a different road. But in any case, it's important to keep track, so we'd recommend you check out Shmoop's summary, too. Read the summary of Sections 1-10, Sections 11-20, and the beginning of Sections 21-30.


Sample Lesson - Activity

Activity 1.01a: Close Reading

Shmoop loves to start a novel with a deep dive. We're a firm believer that close reading the very beginning of a novel is a great way to get to know the novel's tone, themes, and voice. That way, we can know what to look for as we cruise through the rest of the novel.

So now that you've read the first twenty pages or so, you're probably already quite familiar with what this novel has to offer—a bleak vision of an unspecified future in which the world is laid waste. Through that unspecified future walk two unspecified people: a man and his son.

This close reading is asking you to dive in pretty deeply, and so you don't hurt your brain too much, you don't need to write in complete sentences or anything. Just make sure to get the content down, and you'll be okay.

Take a look at the following passages, and answer the questions below.

  1. When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.
    1. What seems to be the situation setting up this novel?

    2. How would you describe the syntax and sentence structure?

    3. What adjectives would you use to describe the tone?

    4. As beginnings of novels go, how would you rate this one? Are you hooked? Totally creeped out? Anything goes—just write down your first reaction.

    5. Check out that simile in the final sentence. What's the effect?

  2. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none.
    1. We get a bit more detail here. What else do we learn about these two characters and their situation?

    2. If you had to guess, why do you think these two guys—the father and son—are in this situation? In other words, how did they wind up sleeping under a tarp and stinky blankets in some gray, bleak world?

  3. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.
    1. Well that was weird. In your own words, describe the man's dream.

    2. There are two more similes in this section. Can you spot 'em? List them below, in quotation-form.

    3. Now do the same for sentence fragments. What's the effect of them? Copy one sentence fragment, and then write why you think McCarthy chose to use a fragment in that situation.

    4. Now let's talk tone and style. List a couple adjectives you might use to describe the tone and style of this passage. No need for complete sentences here, just the adjectives.

    5. Given what you know about this father and son and their current situation, what do you think is the significance of this dream? And why start the novel with a dream in the first place? Jot down 50-75 words in response.

  4. With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasn't sure. He hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.
    1. Ah, now we're getting somewhere. Readers, meet The Road. You know, the VIP road. The title. Why are these two on it?

    2. How long do you think they've been traveling, these two, based on what you've learned from the passage?

    3. Finally, what are the stakes of their journey? What do they have to gain or lose?


Sample Lesson - Activity

  1. Who is on the road?

  2. Why are these two on the road?

  3. What do the father and son pack their things in?

  4. Why do they go back to the gas station?

  5. When the boy asks what his father would do if he died, how does the father respond?

  6. Fill in the blank: "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there _____________."

  7. Fill in the blank: "Mostly he worried about their ____________. That and food."

  8. What are "the right dreams for a man in peril"?

  9. What large piece of human infrastructure do the man and the boy stumble upon toward the end of this reading?

  10. What does the man take from the house that they visit?