Looking out at the world - Ana & Adrie

While reading The Road, we noticed that the man and boy often perch themselves on top of hills and other high-up places, and look out at the vastness of their post-apocalyptic world. As we tracked these moments, we started noticing patterns that explained this behavior.

As they look out from their resting places, McCarthy often describes the boy and man’s view as being extremely desolate. At one point the man “sat in the leaves at the top of the hill and looked into the blackness. Nothing to see. No wind.” (188) The pair are often being consumed by darkness. One way we see them battle this darkness is with fire, both physically and metaphorically.

Fire is a symbol McCarthy uses to represent perseverance and hope, and this is emphasized whenever the boy and man look out from a hill, since most of the time they are looking for a light. In one scene when the man is looking out from a hill in the night, the narration describes how, “In the past when he walked out like that and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he’d sometimes see a light. Dim and shapeless in the murk.” The man is trying to find a sliver of life in his new bleak and deserted reality. We found a connection between this moment and a flashback of the man’s: “A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned.” (187). In this moment, before the apocalypse, the man physically had fire with him, whereas in the book, he was always looking for it.

After noticing these patterns, we decided to make a map following the boy and man through their journey with a specific focus on highlighting the parts where they rest atop hills or look out from high ground.

Map Key:

1) p 187: “He thought of his life. So long ago. A gray day in a foreign city where he stood in a window and watched the street below. Behind him on a wooden table a small lamp burned.” 2) p 9: “they went up to the top of the hill where the road crested and where they could see out to the darkening country to the south, standing there in the wind, wrapped in their blankets, watching for any sign of a fire or a lamp.” 3) p 19: “They walked out and sat on a bench and looked out over the valley where the land rolled away into the gritty fog.” (looking at a dam) 4) p 43-44: “When the bridge came in sight below them there was a tractor-trailer jackknifed sideways across it and wedged into the buckled iron railings. It was raining again and they stood there with the rain pattering softly on the tarp. Peering out from under the blue gloom beneath the plastic.” 5) p 81: “At the top of the hill he turned and studied the town. Darkness coming fast. Darkness and cold.” 6) p 104: “The site they picked was simply the highest ground they came to and it gave views north along the road and overlooking their backtrack.” (hiding from bad guys) 7) p 160: “We can stop now./On the hill?/We can get the cart down to those rocks and cover it with limbs./Is this a good place to stop?/Well, people don’t like to stop on hills. And we don’t like for people to stop./So it’s a good place for us./I think so./Because we’re smart.” 8) p 188: “He sat in the leaves at the top of the hill and looked into the blackness. Nothing to see. No wind. In the past when he walked out like that and sat looking over the country lying in just the faintest visible shape where the lost moon tracked the caustic waste he’d sometimes see a light. Dim and shapeless in the murk. Across a river or deep in the blackened quadrants of a burned city. In the morning sometimes he’d return with binoculars and glass the country for any sign of smoke but never saw any.” 9) p 193: Trying to find people: “If we can get across the creek we could go up on the bluffs there and watch the road.” 10) p 206: “They stood looking out through the tall windows at the darkening land.” 11) p 221: “At the end of the strand their way was blocked by a headland and they left the beach and took an old path up through the dunes and through the dead sea oats until they came out upon a low promontory. Below them a hook of land shrouded in the dark scud blowing down the shore and beyond that lying half over and awash the shape of a sailboat’s hull.” … “Let’s just watch for a while./ I’m cold./ I know. Let’s move down a little ways. Out of the wind. He sat holding the boy in front of him. The dead grass thrashed softly. Out there a gray desolation. The endless sea crawl.” 12) p 267: “He stood looking out. A steel dock half collapsed and submerged in the bay. The wheelhouses of sunken fishingboats standing out of the gray chop. Nothing moving out there. Anything that could move had long been blown away.” 13) p 276: “He scuffled together a pile of the bonecolored wood that lay along the shore and got a fire going and they sat in the dunes with the tarp over them and watched the cold rain coming in from the north. It fell harder, dimpling the sand. The fire steamed and the smoke swung in slow coils and the boy curled up under the pattering tarp and soon he was asleep.”