The Road Lit Log: Strange Imagery

I choose to track odd, out-of-place imagery throughout The Road. I noticed a few of these scenes while reading, but found many more while searching for similar scenes. The ones I noticed first were when the boy plays his flute on the road (77), and when they eat dinner with fine china in a once-glamorous house (209). These were most obvious because the strangeness of the scene is often pointed out by one of the characters themselves. In the dinner scene, McCarthy writes, “They ate slowly out of bone china bowls, sitting at opposite sides of the table with a single candle burning between them. The pistol lying to hand like another dining implement.” (209) The reference to the pistol highlights the strangeness and contradiction of their situation. They’re dirty, starving, and don’t have an end goal. They’re running from cannibals, narrowly escaping death every day, and they’ve seen horrors that will haunt them forever. And yet they’re sitting on opposite ends of this table, illuminated by candlelight, and eating canned food out of ornate bowls like they’re at a fancy Victorian dinner. One way to interpret this vivid contradiction is an attempt at dark humor by McCarthy, a sort of twisted satirical commentary of their situation and the world they’re living in. In such a serious, desperate book, he reminds us of the ridiculousness and perhaps even futility of their journey to find something better in this barren, abandoned world.

However, a search for similar scenes in the book starts to reveal additional themes and intents. In my artwork, I highlighted seven other scenes like these: when they play checkers in the bunker (148), when the wheel on the cart begins to squeak, despite their efforts to fix it (186), when the boy asks what their “long-term goals” are (160), when the boy plays in the abandoned train (180), when they spot a plastic deer in the yard of an abandoned house (185), when they come across a corpse in overalls, sitting on a porch like “a straw man set out to announce some holiday” (199), and lastly when they see themselves in a mirror and don’t recognize themselves (132). Each of these scenes is incredibly strange and awkward, highlighting the bizarre remnants of the world before. However, these are also small moments of humanity - the little boy playing with his father, the humor of a squeaking wheel in an apocalyptic landscape, and the grief and horror of finding human artifacts and remains in unexpected places. These moments make up an odd, and seemingly random collection of slivers of light and humanity in a gray and desolate world. McCarthy seems to be reminding us that humanity will remain, even in the most horrific and desperate of times. It may show up in odd and uncomfortable ways, but it will remain.