McCarthy Unabridged: The Road, Page 247
He let the boy go as this was the last time he would see or touch him. He watched them walk away until the light no longer lit their way. Darkness absorbed them. The man sat and wept until he he had nothing left. He drifted in and out of sleep until morning, when he knew he had to get up and get moving.
He packed everything, put it all in his bag, and started on his way. The man slowly sauntered down the cold and bare dark road. There was a noise coming from up the road. It sounded like a little boy. His little boy. The man didn’t have much energy but he used all that was in him to run towards the sound. There was laughing, and the sound of joyfulness, he could hear it in the distance.
Papa, come here!
The sound of his son's voice made him happy, he ran closer to the sound, but couldn’t find it, it sounded like it was getting further and further away. The happiness in his son’s voice turned into sadness, then to the faint sound of a cry. He finally came upon something, something that was not the boy. It was something he almost recognized. In the man's fugue state he saw the boy’s mother as a chimera, more charybdis than woman.
The man woke with tears streaming down his face, his heart beating fast, and his son calling him to get up.
The character I wanted to mainly focus on in my creative piece was the man and how it would be for him to be without his son. I think the only reason the man tries everyday is so that he can be there for the little boy and help him so that he can survive. When I was deciding what I would make happen to the boy I remembered that his mother did mention taking him at one point in the story in a memory that the man has. I felt that if I had the boys mom take the boy it would make it more interesting than him dying. When thinking of a place to put this I decided I wanted to put it in the part of the book where the little boy is sick. I did this because I knew that the would be worrying about his son, and he would always be thinking about it, even subconsciously. The McCarthy-esque word that I decided to use was Chimera. This word means something that can be hoped for or not, but it happens many times in dreams because it is often times a fantasy that we have. I thought this was very fitting for the situation since this was a dream and he really wanted to see his son again.
When picking a theme for my creative piece, I chose family and loneliness. I wanted to pick them because the boy is his son, and without him he doesn’t really have anything to live for anymore. The man’s son was such a huge part of everything that went on in the book, I feel like family is really important. For the motifs of my added scene of the book, I chose to use fear and dreams. I chose to do a dream because we know this clearly couldn’t have really happened or the story would have been totally different, and also because I wanted to show the fear he would have without having his son and then get to wake up and realize it was just a dream. I chose fear and survival because I wanted to show the fear he has without his son. Lastly, my essential question was very obvious for me after I finished everything else. I did “who/what do we live for? What if it is gone?” the boy was taken from the man and it clearly really hurt him. I wanted to use this question because I feel like it is really interesting and really important as well. It is important in this book and it also really applies to real life which made it even more interesting to me. I think that a lot of the things that I did for my story seemed to fall into place perfectly to create something I am proud of.
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