How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He [The Boy] was a long time going to sleep. After a while he turned and looked at the man. His face in the small light streaked with black from the rain like some old world thespian. Can I ask you something? he said.
[The Man:] Yes. Of course.
[The Boy:] Are we going to die?
[The Man:] Sometime. Not now. (11.1-11.4)
This is about as terse and true a statement of mortality as you'll see anywhere. The Man and The Boy are out in an unforgiving, dangerous world where even the slightest misstep could lead to death. (Like our world, only with its dangers multiplied to the nth degree.) It's pretty simple, The Man says. We're all going to die – just not now.
Quote #2
[The Boy:] I wish I was with my mom.
He [The Man] didnt answer. He sat beside the small figure wrapped in the quilts and blankets. After a while he said: You mean you wish that you were dead.
[The Boy:] Yes.
[The Man:] You musnt say that.
[The Boy:] But I do.
[The Man:] Dont say it. It's a bad thing to say.
[The Boy:] I cant help it.
[The Man:] I know. But you have to.
[The Boy:] How do I do it?
[The Man:] I dont know. (92.4-92.13)
This is a complicated exchanged between The Man and The Boy. In a sense, The Man does know, in their terrible situation, how to keep going. You find someone to devote yourself to (e.g. The Boy) and spend every waking moment fulfilling that purpose. But he can't tell that to The Boy. For one, he doesn't express his feelings like that. And two, it would heap too much pressure on The Boy. Most people, particularly sons and daughters, just get weirded out when you tell them they're the purpose and meaning of your life.
Quote #3
The falling snow curtained them about. There was no way to see anything at either side of the road. He was coughing again and the boy was shivering, the two of them side by side under the sheet of plastic, pushing the grocery cart through the snow. Finally he stopped. The boy was shaking uncontrollably.
We had to stop, he [The Man] said.
[The Boy:] It's really cold.
[The Man:] I know.
[The Boy:] Where are we?
[The Man:] Where are we?
[The Boy:] Yes.
[The Man:] I dont know.
[The Boy:] If we were going to die would you tell me?
[The Man:] I dont know. We're not going to die. (144.1-144.10)
As in Robinson Crusoe, Lost, and other survival stories, these characters often find themselves on the brink of death. But we especially enjoy the nearly absurd dialogue between The Man and The Boy here. (If you've read Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot, dialogue like this might sound familiar.) The Boy wants to know whether The Man would say anything if they were close to death. The Man says he doesn't know if he'd tell The Boy. Then he says, "We're not going to die." How is The Boy supposed to believe him if he just said he might not tell him? Basically, The Boy will just have to take his word for it.
Quote #4
It was harder going even than he would have guessed. In an hour they'd made perhaps a mile. He stopped and looked back at the boy. The boy stopped and waited.
[The Man:] You think we're going to die, dont you?
[The Boy:] I dont know.
[The Man:] We're not going to die.
[The Boy:] Okay.
[The Man:] But you dont believe me.
[. . .]
[The Man:] How long do you think people can go without food?
[The Boy:] I dont know.
[The Man:] But how long do you think?
[The Boy:] Maybe a few days.
[The Man:] And then what? You fall over dead?
[The Boy:] Yes.
[The Man:] Well you dont. It takes a long time. We have water. That's the most important thing. You dont last very long without water.
[. . .]
He [The Man] studied him. Standing there with his hands in the pockets of the outsized pinstriped suitcoat.
[The Man:] Do you think I might lie to you?
[The Boy:] No.
[The Man:] But you think I might lie to you about dying?
[The Boy:] Yes.
[The Man:] Okay. I might. But we're not dying.
[The Boy:] Okay. (155.1-155.32)
This is another example of the absurd discourse about death between The Boy and The Man (see previous quote). It's cool also to think of these dialogues as happening within one person. We all recognize the inevitability of death, and yet at some level we don't acknowledge it. It's normal to avoid thinking about what we fear the most.
Quote #5
He [The Man] was beginning to think that death was finally upon them and that they should find some place to hide where they would not be found. 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. They squatted in a bleak wood and drank ditchwater strained through a rag. He'd seen the boy in a dream laid out on a coolingboard and woke in horror. What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return. (197.1)
This may sound off-topic, but think about boiling water. If you boil water in two pots, and one pot is smaller than the other, not only will the smaller one boil first, you'll also have more pressure built up inside the pot. Well, death is kind of like that; it's the small pot. Put the threat of death in the mix and suddenly everything burns with an unheard-of intensity. Death increases the pressure. In McCarthy's setting, death is lurking around every bend in the road, in every house and every pasture. So it's really no surprise that thinking about beauty and goodness – two things that are already intense – would send The Man into a tear-fest.
Quote #6
Early morning. He looked at the house and he looked out toward the road and he was about to lower the hatch door again when he stopped. The vague gray light was in the west. They'd slept the night through and the day that followed. He lowered the door and secured it again and climbed back down and sat on the bunk. He looked around at the supplies. He'd been ready to die and now he wasn't going to and he had to think about that. [. . .] Finally he rose and went to the table and hooked up the little two burner gas stove and lit it and got out the frying pan and a kettle and opened the box of plastic kitchen implements. (216.1)
The Man has spent so long thinking that he's going to die that now, in a relatively safe place, he doesn't know to do with himself. The Man's response to his quandary is both simple and beautiful: he begins to make breakfast.
Quote #7
[The Man:] There's no one here. There has been no one here for years. There are no tracks in the ash. Nothing disturbed. No furniture burned in the fireplace. There's food here.
[The Boy:] Tracks dont stay in the ash. You said so yourself. The wind blows them away. (291.17-291.18)
Erasure in The Road is pretty much total. Much of what once characterized the lives of the survivors has been incinerated into ash, and when they walk on that ash, the wind erases their footprints. So, imagine playing the song "Dust in the Wind" while parts of your stereo system crumbled and blew away. "Yeah," you would say. "McCarthy was right. This world is transient."
Quote #8
At night when we woke coughing he'd sit up with his hand pushed over his head against the blackness. Like a man waking in a grave. Like those disinterred dead from his childhood that had been relocated to accommodate a highway. Many had died in a cholera epidemic and they'd been buried in haste in wooden boxes and the boxes were rotting and falling open. The dead came to light lying on their sides with their legs drawn up and some lay on their stomachs. The dull green antique coppers spilled from out the tills of their eyesockets onto the stained and rotted coffin floors. (294.1)
OK, this is gross, but it's also noteworthy. Sometimes when The Man wakes up in the middle of the night, he feels like he's woken up in a grave. It's not just any grave, though, it's a mass grave. Which, all things considered, is a pretty accurate metaphor for the setting of the novel. After that "long shear of light," the world has become one big mass grave (88.1). Talk about horrifying and depressing.
Quote #9
They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless. (307.1)
McCarthy's repetition of the world "senseless" here is pretty amazing. We interpret this double-whammy as follows. In the first "senseless," McCarthy is talking about the ocean itself and its lack of sentient creatures – it's literally devoid of any feeling beings. But the second "senseless" is a value judgment about all this death. It's "senseless," meaning pointless. We couldn't agree more.
Quote #10
He [The Boy] slept close to his father that night and held him but when he woke in the morning his father was cold and stiff. He sat there a long time weeping and then he got up and walked out through the woods to the road. When he came back he knelt beside his father and held his cold hand and said his name over and over again. (385.1)
We find The Boy's response to his father's death is touching. He remembers and commemorates his father simply by repeating his name "over and over again." This, of course, has a special resonance in the story because none of the characters are named.