The Road Sections 291-300 Quotes
The Road Sections 291-300 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)
[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 2
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 3
Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash. He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. I'm sorry it's not blue, he said. That's okay, said the boy. (297.1)
OK, this is really sad. The Man and The Boy have been traveling for some time in the hope that things might be better on the coast. They finally get there in the last third of the novel. Are things any better? Is there some hope left in this terrible world? Hardly. Just listen to this sentence: "Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of." Plus, the ocean isn't even blue. You had to expect this kind of thing, though. McCarthy isn't going to give us a fun beach scene – he's going to give us an existential sea, with some more ash just for good measure.