The Road Sections 71-80 Quotes

The Road Sections 71-80 Quotes

How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)

Quote 1

There was a skylight about a third of the way down the roof and he made his way to it in a walking crouch. The cover was gone and the inside of the trailer smelled of wet plywood and that sour smell he'd come to know. He had a magazine in his hip pocket and he took it out and tore some pages from it and wadded them and got out his lighter and lit the papers and dropped them into the darkness. A faint whooshing. He wafted away the smoke and looked down into the trailer. The small fire burning in the floor seemed a long way down. He shielded the glare of it with his hand and when he did he could see almost to the rear of the box. Human bodies. Sprawled in every attitude. Dried and shrunken in their rotted clothes. The small wad of burning paper drew down to a wisp of flame and then died out leaving a faint pattern for just a moment in the incandescence like the shape of a flower, a molten rose. Then all was dark again. (76.1)

This is just scary. When you open a basement door, or walk down a dark hallway, you sometimes imagine some pretty ridiculous things, most of which never turn out to be real. (Mostly because they're just impossible.) In the universe of The Road, however, things turn out worse than anyone (except Cormac McCarthy) could imagine. The Man climbs up to the skylight of a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck. When he peers into the truck, he sees a collection of corpses sprawled inside the container.