Monday, October 17, 2011

The Wasteland

For quite some time I have been an avid fan of the post apocalyptic setting, be it in movies, video games, books, etc. While some may find the lackluster and bleak nature of such tales off-putting, I, on the other hand, am helplessly drawn into the wasteland. Where some people may only discover death, famine and pestilence among the ravaged environments of the setting, I often see the little glimmers of life and hope shining through the desolate landscape. When I heard we were to read The Road as part of the course, I rejoiced. Having heard of the book and the subsequent movie based upon it for quite some time now, I figured I would be right at home within the pages of Cormac McCarthy's tale.



The Road by American author Cormac McCarthy, is a novel narrating the struggle of a man and his son to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Both the boy and father remain anonymous throughout the book, perhaps helping the reader embody the characters and become more involved in the events of the plot. both characters are driven to walk for miles each day with the sole purpose of survival. However the attitude of both characters seem to differ. The child has apparently grown up in this ravaged America and remembers very little of the life before the catastrophe. In a way both characters are two sides of the same coin: society/civilization. The father is the embodiment of society before the event, and how he is coping with the aftermath. He finds himself rather lost in the wasteland and there is little keeping him alive. What is compelling him to survive however, is keeping his boy safe and the basic instinct to survive. The boy on the other hand is an allegory of society born after the apocalypse, struggling to survive in this new setting.

The presence of ash in the book is hard to ignore. From this one can begin to get clues as to what happened  that left Earth in such a state of despair. I can only infer that the event that wiped out most of humanity was either a nuclear war or perhaps a celestial body hitting our planet. From the former one can assume the ash, the darkness and the gray snow are the effects of nuclear winter that will envelop the planet for years to come. The asteroid theory also might explain this phenomenon. The impact from a rather large celestial body would cause particles of dust to rise up to the atmosphere, covering the earth for years, causing impact winter. The presence of seared trees could also be explained by the subsequent heat that would be produced from the impact of an asteroid.

When the book opens up, the first three sentences manage to capture the reader's mind into the desolation:
"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."
From the get-go it is apparent that some cataclysm has has devastated the world, leaving the ash badlands. However the event is never fully fleshed out and it is left to the reader to figure out what left the world in ruins. Here we are introduced to the protagonists, waking up in the middle of a forest. The cold darkness referred to in the text might be a symbol for the ever present melancholy the world is now engulfed in. It is apparent that as time passes the situation doesn't improve, but in fact becomes a more difficult task to survive. As a result each day one finds less and less hope among the ash covered wasteland. McCarthy's use of the word glaucoma is an interesting one. Glaucoma is a condition of increased pressure within the eyeball, causing gradual loss of sight. From this definition one can assume that McCarthy is referring to God gradually turning his sight away from humanity, leaving us helpless in the darkness.