Cormac McCarthy's The Road - 2007 Pulitzer Winner

I just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road on Sunday night. I'll confess that it had been sitting on my bookshelf for years and was one of those purchases that probably had more to do with the "buy 1 get 1 half price sticker" still on the book's front cover rather than any interest I actually had in reading it at the time. I previously read McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, and I confess, I was bored to tears. The  only reason I took the book from the shelf last week was to check the title off of my Pulitzer list. I wasn't looking forward to reading about a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, and I was relieved when I opened the book and realized the font was fairly large (i.e. the book wasn't very long). 

Then I started reading, and I have to say, I loved this book. Unlike many other readers, I didn't find McCarthy's lack of punctuation and lack of complete sentences distracting, which is surprising, because I have to confess, I'm a bit of a punctuation nut. I found his sparse prose beautiful and well suited to the subject matter. Based on McCarthy's well known distaste of the semicolon and other punctuation, I'm not sure that I agree with other readers that the punctuation (or lack thereof) in The Road is really meant to underscore the book's themes and to further illustrate the fact that the man and boy are on the precipice of starvation. But I do love the idea that his punctuation isn't a matter of personal style but was, rather, meant to convey something about the story. I'm just not buying it. 

The one thing I can't quite figure out is his lack of use of apostrophes in only those conjunctions involving the word "not," e.g. dont, cant, wouldnt, shouldnt, didnt, and werent. Why does he omit apostrophes from only these conjunctions and leave them in other words? If somebody knows the answer, please comment. I'd love to hear any theories.  

But enough about the punctuation, that's not the main event. This is the story of a father and son who walk along a road in a cold, dark world, heading for the coast. The father dreams only of survival, but the boy longs for the color of the sea, which he has never seen, and other survivors, namely other children. The man and his son are frightened, starving, and plagued by nightmares that come both on the road and in their sleep. In this bleak setting McCarthy explores themes of survival and faith, and he examines the human psyche in the face of such destruction.     

But this is really a love story. The man's love for his son is so deep that it fuels him. His only interest is in protecting his child. Thoughts of suicide and of death are constantly present, but the man keeps moving along the road, fighting for his child's survival despite questions of whether the child wants to survive or whether survival in the face of such horrors should really be his goal. As they fight for survival, the man attempts to bring joy to his son's life, carving him a flute, remembering the boy's toy truck when they are forced to leave many of their possessions behind, and feeding a starving man, even though they too are starving, because it is what the boy wants. He also struggles to teach his child that good does exist, telling his son that they are the good guys, and they carry the fire, even though I don't think the man believes this anymore. We also see how well the man has done in the face of such adversity because the boy truly is a "good guy," always ensuring that his Papa shares their provisions equally and wanting to rescue others that they meet on their journey. Despite growing up in a world so desolate and peopled by evil men who eat other humans, the boy is still amazingly uncorrupted and trusting.

I think this book also appealed to my early interest in pioneer stories involving people who lived off the land and struggled to survive (although in this case, everything is dead, and they are forced to scavenge for old canned goods, which is a bit different than the Laura Ingalls Wilder books of my youth). Despite my early misgivings, I highly recommend The Road to other readers.