Road Map

“The Road ” is a book that is woven with descriptive and morbid words and events, that creates a truly harrowing story. The two main characters trek across a burned and dead Earth on a voyage to nothing. They take the reader with them as they go, and every little thing is expressed with the utmost of detail. The characters are nameless, and the journey ends without a destination. Although the destination throughout the story is never really decided on, one thing these characters did stick to was the road. The road wasn’t a single solitary road, but a series of different off-chutes and main interstates that made their journey. Because all the reader knows is what the man knows, mapping this trek would be next to impossible. However, a map doesn’t just have to be the physical route they went, so this map is of something a little different.

I decided to guess the area they started out in and how their journey laid out. New York state and New Jersey was my best guess, so that’s what’s on the map. I decided to document most of the times that the dad has an internal monologue and turn those moments into symbols. Then, I guessed a route that seemed accurate and drew those symbols on the map to where they could have happened. The first symbol comes from page 75 when he says, “Golden chalice, good to house a god.” The man is of course talking about the boy here, saying how he sees the essence of god in him. Skipping a few, on page 114, he thinks, “Can you do it? When the time comes?..Curse God and die.” I drew the gun for this moment. The gun holds so much power, they protect it with their lives and in this moment he is willing to use it despite his god. In the third to last one, the boy gets sick and the man says this: “You have to stay near, you have to be quick. So you can be with him. Hold him close.” I picked the blind monster in the beginning to signify that everything wrong that happens to them is really just up to chance and there is nothing deciding their fate. Sickness, the world dying, hunger, they’re all blind. McCarthy shows the ups and downs of their trip in these small looks into the man’s mind, but overall it shows his slow decline in hope and climb in desperation. In the beginning he seems hopeful, “Golden chalice, good to house a god”, but by the end the man has completely lost hope and seems strung-out: “He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.”(261)