Blog Feed

Be aware by reading this passage you have opened your mind into what could be a parallel universe from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ..

Holding the boy in his arms rubbing his thin black hair.

Its going to be okay.

Okay ?

Okay .

Close your eyes and go to sleep.

Inhale. Exhale. His eyes are closed. The man lays him down. Feel the breeze that flows across his body. His dreams begin to take over his thoughts. Hear the ocean breeze that runswards the sand. A familiar voice in the distance.

Honey.

Honey, come on.

You’re going to miss the kite show.

Without any words exchanged, the man walks towards her. Holding out his hand, waiting to touch hers. Twirling her around in his hands. Laughter and love fills the air. A countdown from a crowd full of people.

Five.

Four.

Three.

Two.

One.

Eyes all over the crowd light up like stars in the sky.

Turn around and close your eyes.

Okay.

Covering her eyes, distracted by the noise from the crowd around her he says turn back around. Down on one knee he was with a little black book. Before the question could be asked the answer came unfold.

Yes I do.

The man go up from one knee and kissed her. Everyone around him became mute. He was the happiest man on earth. Holding hands walking towards  where the ocean meets the sand. There was nothing in view except for dim path of light. She walks towards in extending her hand.

Come with me.

He takes her hand nothing left but footsteps on the sand as their souls walk towards the never ending pathway of light.

Although my part never made the cut, here is my rationale to explain the choices I made for my project ..

The placement in where I choose to start my creative piece  is significant because in the book “The Road”, in  boy’s mind his dream was so strong that instantly he awakened  full of emotions. Almost as  if the dream was really real.  It is interesting because to the man he was unaware that the boy unknowingly had a dream about the man dying. I choose to do a scene about a dream because in the book dreams are nothing but an illusion of reality. Dreams in this book have multiple meanings to them. The dreams are essentially a parallel universe, however each dream varies on the outcome.  Whether it is negative or positive or whether the man or the boy posses the dream. It reveals a new fragment to the plot of the story. 

The plot for the creative piece was very simple. In the book “The Road” the man shows his affection towards the boy in a  oddly way. It comes across however as reader as severely over protective. I wanted to recreate a time in the man’s life where he was once carefree and happy. His wife who is signified as “her” in this section is not mentioned often in the actual book because, she leaves in the very beginning of the book. It is unknown of what really happened to her character, although you have a clue. Therefore I created this flash black in the man dreams, where he was head over heels in love with her. The setting is on the beach, which is a familiar setting in the book. However there are people all around, caught by the attention of the kites in the sky. The man proposes to the women and their full of bliss. But the twist is at the very end it says “He takes her hand nothing left but footsteps on the sand as their souls walk towards the never ending pathway of light.”, this sentence right here is SUPER important. I say this because it lets you know that this is not real. The man and woman are no longer in existent,as it says their souls leave their body.  By context clues you can infer that the man and woman are following the never ending light which would be considered the gateway to heaven. My McCarthy-esque word is runswards which means to run forward and or to run towards.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

This is a scene I imagine was cut before the final publication of The Road on page 259, continuing from the above statement.

I worry about where we’re going, what will happen to us, the ones who eat people.

The boy held his gaze

Where are we going Papa?

We’re going south

What’s in the south Papa?

I wish I was dead

The man came to life and grabbed his son by his shoulders and shook him hard

Don’t say that!

Why not? Mama’s over there, we won’t be hungry, we won’t be scared.

We’re carrying the fire

You killed that man.

I didn’t kill him

You took everything from him

He stole from us!

He didn’t steal clothes off our backs. What is the point of carrying the fire if you only carry it for yourself?

He looked down at the boy, his shoulders lifting heavily with every breath.

He was a bad guy

Everyone isn’t a bad guy! If we were really good guys we would help people. We wouldn’t take everything from people. If you had found blankets and food would you have just left it there?

He knelt to a squatting position and rubbed his legs.

No

Then how is he worse than us?

He rose until he met the boy’s eyeline and looked into his eyes.

What if I promise to pass the fire onto the people we meet, as long as they’re not cannibals?

I want you to do it because it’s what’s right

Okay. We share the fire. And if they’re bad

you’ve gotta take a shot.

Inserted Scene

(The Road 66) They came to an old iron bridge in the woods where the vanished road had crossed an all but vanished stream. He was starting to cough and he’d hardly the breath to do it with.  He dropped down out of the roadway and into the woods. He turned and stood gasping, trying to listen. He heard nothing. They were but ten minutes from the roadrats. Maybe less. Looming trees around them, leafskinned and twisted. Barren branches like tendrils. Scorched, scaly bark. They moved through the carcass of the woods and the man coughed and coughed and coughed and looked behind him frequently but they werent there. Still no time to catch their breath as they hurried through the shadowy grove until the woods were suddenly blazing bright and tormented with loud snaps.

The man yanked the boy’s arm and pulled him away. An ablaze tree fell in front of them and thundered. In every direction trees crashing down. Some alight with flame. This way! He held the boy’s hand tight and darted them out of the way of falling tree. A growl erupted from the ground where tree connected. They ran but the boy was dragging. Papa! The man coughing and weak and exhausted but somehow with the energy to maneuver around the falling trees. One nearly hit the boy but the man snatched him out of the way. Trees still crashing. Why are they falling Papa? They had nowhere else to go. They continued around the trees through the howls and the ripping and the thuds until it was finally quiet.

The man stopped and looked back at the carnage. Hulking trunks splayed across the ground. Smoke oozing into the gray sky. The man held the boy’s hand. The boy was silent. The man pushed forward. He staggered on another half mile or so and finally dropped to his knees and put the boy down in the ashes and leaves. He wiped the blood from his face and held him. It’s okay. It’s okay.

Rationale — An explanation of the decisions made in the inserted scene

The essential theme that shaped and created my cut scene of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road was the theme of changed purposes in the new world. What was not dangerous before have become threats, and threats are everywhere. What was devalued or taken for granted before have become vital and necessities. I wanted a scene that revolved around an example of this, which is why I added a scene in which they are in the woods and trees fall around around them. This connects to this idea of changed purposes by having the man and the boy in a dangerous situation where the danger is trees, something that in the old world was innocuous and not dangerous, even were symbols of life and peace, and have become threats in this new world. My scene serves to foreshadow and reflect all the parts throughout the book that have or have to do with changed purposes and the transfer from the pre-apocalyptic world to the post-apocalyptic world by having it revolve around this theme.

My choice of placement has to do with the characterization and character development that takes place. I wanted to develop the way in which these characters behave in the face of immediate danger — how they act under impulses and under adrenaline. They are always at risk as long as they are on their journey but I wanted to develop this side of their characters in an extreme situation. This is why I chose to insert this scene at the bottom of page 66, which is moments after they escaped the roadrats: they are already in the woods, they are early enough into the journey to not be on or near the brink, and having just escaped the claws of danger adds to the intensity of the situation. Since these are the driving forces of the scene, the themes of fear and survival were also addressed, as they act out of fear and desire to survive under the pressure of this danger.

The passage I wrote below is what I imagined was cut from Cormac McCarthy's The Road while he was writing the book.

He knew he shouldnt have come. Entering the house meant all the memories rushingback to him, but he couldnt help it. Seeing something that once represented his haven in a cold, godless world led to feelings he was not able to describe. He thought that visiting his house would not have a big impact on him. He just wanted to be able to revisit his childhood, his past. The mistake he made was not realizing how dangerous memories can be and how change can affect someone. He didnt know until he was able to see that it was just not the same anymore. Dreams in the world did not represent a child’s imaginings or nightmares. Dreams now meant one or the other: the present or the future. Bad dreams made him fear the world he lives in, but it still reassured him that he was alive. Good dreams let him knew he was giving up. That the end was coming for him.

When it was too late, he noticed that only the house that stood was the present. All of the memories, the events, the happiness were left in the past. His whole life was gone before his eyes. Nothing left. What is there to live for he thought. What is left in this world. Is there hope?  He wondered if this is how weak he has already gotten to think about death so easily. Everything so gray. The world so empty.

Here is my rationale to explain the decisions I made for my project.

For my section, I placed it on page 27, after the first paragraph. I wanted to be able to touch more upon the idea of good and bad dreams and giving up, so I thought it would be most beneficial to place it where I did because the paragraph focused on his memories and dreams. My scene adds more to the man’s character development because the readers are able to see how dangerous memories can be. Just by the man remembering his childhood and recalling his joyful moments, it makes it harder for him to move on and shatters his firm belief of trying to survive in a world where everything is gone. In order to foreshadow how sever his illness is, I made him think about giving up and death since that shows the readers that he is having a hard time trying to keep moving on. Foreshadowing this in his house seemed like an interesting choice since his house only represented what is now “dead”. While the house itself was still present, all of the memories and moments shared in his home were dead along with everyone else he cared about.

The theme I chose is dangers of memory. Good memories from the past seem to be one of the biggest obstacles because they remind the man of what he used to have and what he doesn’t have anymore. This theme is significant in my scene because everything is revolved around the idea of how memories can interfere with trying to keep going. My motif is dreams because I think dreams and memories have a very close relationship with each other. Both have always been a recurring theme since memories hinder the man’s motivation to keep going and dreams only made him fear the outcomes: being alive in a dead world or the end coming for him. The essential question I asked was: What is there to live for? What is the point of continuing to survive? Because there is nothing left, both characters have thought about this question at least once in the novel. Even the readers cannot help but ask this question since there seems to be no hope of living in a better environment in the near future. Even in the novel, there are numerous obstacles that tell them dying is easier than surviving. As for a McCarthy-esque vocabulary, I used “rushingback”. I put these two words together because I wanted to create the illusion of all the memories literally coming back to the man at once.

Explanation:

The piece below is what I would've imagined Cormac McCarthy having in the final copy of The Road, but it was not placed in the story. I felt that the story was missing the essential component of why exactly is the man continuing his trek down the road even though he knows that there is not much to live for. I felt that the explanation for this would best fit in a part where only the man is awake and the boy is asleep, but earlier in the story which gives support for the use of page 83. It was quintessential for the boy to be asleep so the father could drift off into his thoughts without an interruption from his son. I imagined this scene to be a flashback with the man and his wife were discussing what would be happening after stuff went down with the nuclear winter. The man and his wife were meant to have a back and forth so it showed a sense of tension in a situation like this. I felt that the man in the whole book was walking the road to give the boy a life and show him the world while being by his side. I felt that, that message was not flat out stated and was not revealed much and it was needed to be brought out in this piece.

Life is the main theme of this piece; the rest of the novel is very dark and gray, but with this I wanted to bring some light into the book. Although it does not scream “flowers and unicorns everywhere” and “ding dong the witch is dead”, I wanted to show the value of life and others lives in the piece.

The style aspect of this was hard due to the lack of quotation marks and the straight to the point language, and when I read a book, I usually come across a lot of beating around the bush and wordy sentences. It was tricky to be less wordy with my piece and to be straight to the point. I wanted to be blunt, but not too blunt that it was very boring to read.

Creative Portion:

Insert at page 83 after “Yes because we are carrying the fire.”

The man sat and thought to himself in the wee hours of the morning as the boy rested beside him.

Are we really carrying the fire? I feel that I am failing the boy. I want to show him the proper life, but god, look what is around me.

He looked through the forest as if he was looking for the answer all around him; he could not seem to find it.

He imagined the conversation he had with his wife just before she left. She was pacing back and forth, wondering what was going to happen to her, the man, and the boy. Her palms were growing clammy like the dew in the morning which the man and the boy would wake up to.

What are you going to do when the shit hits the fan? How are you two gonna survive.

We will… we will have to make due with what’s left.

What do you mean what is left? There will be nothing left.

The boy has quite a life to live, even though this shit happened. Look you have to realize that. You need to stop being so negative. I want the boy to live a somewhat normal life.

How do you expect to do that?

I don’t know… I guess it will just come when the time comes. I’ll teach him about life, i’ll show him the world; shit I’ll do the best I can. I need to do this for him. The boy means the world to me. I know my condition is worsening, but i’ll have to keep on going for the boy.

*End of piece*

• What TV show did you watch in class?

• Today in class we watched a show called Digital Nation.

1. What was this show about?

• Digital Nation was a show that shows the different ways to use the internet. It shows us all the ways the internet can be used. It was people of different ages using it and the dangers that it can come with.

2. What is the most memorable thing to you about this show?

• The one thing that I can remember was that it showed how the internet can really have a negative effect on you.

3. Why/Why not -  is it important to watch shows like these?

• It's important to watch shows like this so it can teach you what not to do on the internet. It also shows you how to trust the internet when it comes down to online safety.

4. How will you keep your future family safe online?

• I will make sure that they are on websites i approve of. I will make sure that i have a code on my computer for the safety and for the websites they can not get on. I will also want access to there accounts for anything.

5. Why is it important to talk with your family about internet safety

• I think it's important so they don’t find anything online bad about you or about what websites you have been on. I really would just tell them not to trust the internet.

6. What advice would you give to parents that don't know how to keep their children safe online?

• I would tell them to just make sure you are mindful for what websites your child is on. Please make sure that they are being respectful online.

• Find a copyright-less photo/image to enhance your post

The passage I have molded below represents an opportunity that I have capitalized on in the hopes of establishing a deeper understanding of a character in the book The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Creative Piece

The man focused on what he perceived to be the wind without answering the boy's statement. He drifted on into his own thoughts forgetting about the boy and the world around him. The man opened his eyes shortly afterwards only to find the boy gone. There was a camp fire set up despite the fact that the man had no tools to light one himself. He quickly arose and began to panic in search of his boy only to have a shadowy figure approach him. The man quickly aimed his flare gun at the figure.

Where’s my son

A young handsome man arose from the shadows with a face that seemed oddly familiar to the man.

Is he important to you

Are you an idiot

I’m whatever you want me to be

did you take my son?

If I did

Then you’ll die

What gives you the right

My son does

He’s just a boy

He’s everything to me

Would you kill for him

It’d be the right thing to do

The fire

What

You carry it don’t you

What kind of bullshit-

Don’t let it consume you otherwise it’ll burn out

Wait who are-

It’s your serah after all

The man awoke to the sound of the boy yelling at him

Papa you’re coughing blood

It’s fine

It’s not

I said it’s fine go back to sleep I have medecine.

The man ignored his own blood in favor of pondering what exactly he just experienced.

Rationale:

My rationale behind the creation of this passage is that I wanted to further define a motif often present in The Road. Throughout the book the boy and man have conflicting ideologies of righteousness and perseverance which leave them at odds with one another. Despite their differences however the man and the boy still agree that they are both “carrying the fire.” This phrase is important to both the man and the boy as it drives them forward in their pursuit of survival. For my passage I wanted this motif of fire to be defined more clearly for the man and thus I had the man have a dream where he comes into direct contact with his own personal “fire.”

For my dream I wanted the man to realize that the fire he possessed was defined as his right to deal justice and his integrity as a human being. To do this I had the man placed in a scenario where he was given the upperhand as a the judge, jury and executioner. I did this also bearing in mind that the man was already recently placed in a similar scenario where his boy believed he made the wrong choice. I had the shadowy figure in dream be one who didn’t seem threatening to the man to have him further question if killing him was the right choice if he had taken the boy. This was important to me because it allowed me to show that the boy’s well being dictated what the man perceived as justice and integrity. The boy was fueling the man’s fire. I wanted this also to be shown as a serious problem for the man which I did by having the shadowy figure mention that the man’s fire could consume him. This was to show that if the man focuses too much on the boy then he could wind up hurting the boy along with himself in the future.

At the very end of the passage I had the shadowy figure mention that the man’s fire could consume him. At this point I had the man refer to the fire as the man’s “serah.” The purpose of this word was to represent the man’s convictions and and approach to life. The man’s serah up until this point in book was to isolate the boy from the world in order to survive. I wanted this be the point in the book where man question if his “serah” was right. The man constantly brushes off the righteous morals of the boy throughout the book and I used this dream to have the man question if the boy was right to have his morals.

In the morning they walked along the river, following a small trail of old footsteps that mixed the sand with mud and grime. Hollowed trees littered the riverbank and the excess of water had long since drove the trees into the murky grey water. A small village stood ahead, with homes that sat covered with ash and half flooded. A tarp sat in the middle of the village covering a three-legged stand. The man lifted the tarp to find an old painting of a man and a dog running down a green road with the joyful sun smiling down on them. A tragic reminder of the bright and simple past.

Can we bring it with us?

No, it’s too big for the cart.

Okay.

The boy looked at the buildings around them as they stood and swayed in the blackened swamp.

Should we look through the home?

No, there's nothing here.

He left the tarp covering the painting and walked away, the boy looked at the painting for a moment before following him, the faded blue tarp left on the stand to guard the ancient oiled canvas. They made camp further down the trail, the boy was still looked back towards the sunken village.

Papa, are their any more paintings?

Maybe

Can I make one

Yes, when you're safe

Okay

The man felt a cough building in his long-damaged lungs and turned away from the boy as his throat released a stream of ash and dead air.

This is my Rationale to explain why I feel that these choices should have been made;

In my piece, I started out with a description of their location, as most of the Road segments begin. As the piece fits in on page 276, I mentioned the tidal river with the broken bridge and used it to set up a broken flooded environment where they are forced to go around, following a path left by previous travelers. I decided to bring in a village in order to provide a place for the painting to feel natural and show a subtle piece of character development for the boy.

I choose to add in the painting to show a small remainder of hope in the barbaric world of The Road. Additionally the painting would work to give the boy an understanding of why to live on, showing him a small image of the world before and the idea that their can still be beauty in this world. The painting also allows a closer look at the boy who is shown to be quite creative at some points such as towards the beginning when he paints his face-mask with a piece of charcoal. The boy also asks if they can keep it, given that it’s his trademark response to almost all of the new things he finds.

Another smaller moment I added in was the boy asking if they should search the houses. The boy has constantly expressed fear when it comes to searching the houses, but here he understands the need to live on and is willing to take a chance in order to live on. This also sets up the ending where he is willing to take a chance and join the group. However the man is more guarded and disagrees with taking the chance as he knows he doesn’t have much time left and doesn’t want to take the chance and have his luck finally run out.

The boy later asks the man if their are any more painting and if he would be able to make one. The man’s response of “Yes, when you’re safe” rather than “when we are safe” is a subtle foreshadowing of the man’s approaching death that the boy doesn’t catch on. Finally the man’s cough shows how close he is to dying at this point.