I: A significant secret held in McCarthy's The Road is the author's choice to withhold exactly what the disaster was. McCarthy leaves it so ambiguous that the reader queries whether the disaster was man made or an event which occurred naturally.
II:This secret can be compared to another secret which the author keeps from us, the secret of why the boy, "Papa," and the wife survived. These secrets are related because if the reader understood exactly what took place, perhaps we could understand why specific people died and other survived.
III: While this secret is not a necessity to understanding the novel as a whole, it would certainly provide an entirely different level of understanding the novel. While it makes sense the author wants to provide the reader with the same level of understanding of the disaster that the characters have, it is highly unlikely that the characters, several years after the disaster, would not have known what had happened.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I agree with what you are trying to say, the author indeed does leave a certain level of understanding, and I do not believe all the characters are clueless as to what happened. Possibly the boy does not know the cause of this disaster, in which on PG. 43 he asks "Papa" questions, that only leaves me to imply "Papa", knew what happened, but the boy being at a young age, he was not ready to tell the boy just everything yet.
I agree with the idea that several years later that the characters would not have known what happened. I believe the father knew exactly what had occured. He knew why he had survived and why others didn't. He withholds this information from his son, the reader is given the amount of knowledge that a 6 or 7 year old boy would comprehend. In this way the story is almost written from a child's prespective because we know only what he would know.
I agree with you on all points. I think the author may have withheld information on the disaster because in a way, it helps set the tone. The characters are in a confusing, bleak world, and are in the dark about lots of things. You can see this when the man says he doesn't know if the whole world was affected or if things will really be better where they're headed. While he probably knows what caused the disaster, he doesn't know the full scale of what the disaster itself caused. By keeping bits and pieces of information from the readers, the author can in a way make us feel as lost as the characters are.
I agree with his point that if the reader is told more about the disaster then it would make it easier to read. I think that the characters in the story know what caused the disaster, but have no way of knowing of how far it went. The boy doesnt know what caused the disaster because he wasnt born until after it. The father doesnt explain anything to much detail to him because he doesnt think he needs to know. Withholding key information from the reader I think is the authors way of relating you to survivors.
Post a Comment