The image shows a truck, and the boy was terrified of leaving the “important things the man and the boy left behind. We have decided to change the size of things to show their importance. The tomato can that they left would have been very beneficial to their survival since they always seem to run out of food. The father decided that it would be safer to leave the barn that had food instead of staying at the risk of the owners coming back. The use of “fire the boy was carrying” changed the whole story. If something bad was going to happen, they would say they would make it because they were “carrying the fire.”. This shows that the fire was purely imaginary but had a major impact on the mental health of the man and boy, helping them persevere through the days they spent traveling. Like the fire, the father and son’s belief in God is challenged many times throughout the book. The most memorable time is on page 170, when they meet a blind man who starts to converse with them, leading to a conversation about God going, “I guess God would know it. Is that it?” The blind man then says, “There is no God.” In response, the man says, “No?” getting the response, “There is no God, and we are his prophets.” In the image, the reader can see all the different components that play a role in this book, like the main ones being the fire and the flare gun, since they were great turning points and stopped with the characters throughout the book. The road obviously shows the gloomy setting, and we decided not to color it in to really show how dark and gloomy the setting is by showing little to nothing in dark color or color in general. The mountains in the background also relate to the setting because it shows the rough conditions that they were in since it was cold and we can tell that by the snowy trees mentioned in the beginning of the book.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy can be imagined and interpreted in many different ways. The element I chose to follow was the shelters the man and the boy stayed in. They must constantly move places, going further South and avoiding danger along the way. Most of the time, they slept in the woods with a fire that just barely lit for warmth, and ate what the man could salvage. There were many instances when the man went out looking for shelters with the boy, but they had to be careful not to be seen. One of the first places they found was a run down and wrecked gas station; “He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use.” (6)

On the right side of the map, it shows the first places the man and the boy had been, each place the man looked carefully for food and resources for the both of them. It was difficult considering everything had been either destroyed or ransacked. Continuing forward through the woods and run-down houses, the man found a hatch. “Huddled against the back wall were naked people, male and female, all trying to hide, shielding their faces with their hands.” (110)

This was not the first or the last time they had encountered other people. People in either the same or worse situation than the man and the boy were a threat. They were starved, cold, and anything could become a resource. They had to stay protected, but throughout the novel McCarthy shows many examples of the man taking risks that could be life threatening. Going down the hatch could have easily been a trap, a dead end, and anything could have happened. It seems that the man took the risk because there was a chance of warmth, a chance for food; safety for the boy. The second time they came upon a hatch, the boy was hesitant; but the man was going to take the chance. Anything they find could have been useful and allowed them to continue pushing forward. “Crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots.” (135) Taking the risk and seeing what was down the second hatch proved to be helpful for them. In their tough situation, it was crucial to take the chances the man did for safety and survival. It was not only for himself, but for the boy he was determined to protect.

The world of The Road there is nothing but a “Cold. Desolate. Birdless.” (215) wasteland. There is nothing alive nor anything with color, and this emptiness has seeped into the hearts of the main characters, though mostly the father. Their hearts and minds have become as cold and as desolate as the wastes around them. With all they have seen, all they have done, there is nothing else to do but cut yourself off from the pain and emotion, and this is exactly the father wishes for, “If only my heart were stone.” (11). And at some point he is able to cut off a big part of that emotion and the wasteland is then “As gray as his heart.” (27), but not letting yourself feel and cutting off that portion of your heart will inevitably lead to loss of one’s identity and sense of self. Like the world around them these characters lose all sense of identity and become nothing more than a husk, nothing but an animal looking to survive, and most of the time that is exactly what they have to be. They do not have the freedom to be anything, and the moments when they do have that freedom are fleeting and ephemeral. The father says it best himself, “I’m not anything.” (64), these characters even lack one of the most important parts of identity - a name. At no point in this book do we ever learn the names of the boy or of the father, and in the end they remain mysteries, much like the wasteland they inhabit, cold, and gray, and desolate.

The Road by Cormac Mcarthy has many themes establish and develop so picking one to track wasn’t easy, however after the final reading it was. Since early in the book the man has been sick but we are never told the cause. Despite the relative mystery behind his illness it is safe to assume it has some relation to the state of the world. With no clean water and limited access to food maintaining health is no easy task. This is prominent through the health of the child as he has grown and lived through this world, he is often described as thin and malnourished. We see the boys physical struggles described on pages 38 and 74 as “The boy was so thin it stopped his heart” or “The water was so cold the boy was crying”. It is safe to say their collective health is on a steady decline, there are moments that they were doing well but the man is frequently coughing. The lowest point in terms of health was about mid way through the book as they faced starvation almost killing them. On page 118 the man could barely climb a ladder even after eating he is noticeably weak, the boy notices on page 133 when he asks “How many days to death?”. There are moments of rejuvenation in finding more recourses as described on page 144 “He’d been ready to die and now he wasn’t going to and he had to think about that.” even in the progress the man is admittedly defeated as he knows he is only adding time to the clock. Eventually we begin to see just how critical his situation is on page 237 were “He woke coughing” “Coughing. Coughing. He bent over, holding his knees. Taste of blood.”. Readers can only assume this means the man is close to his limit, the man knows this too on page 237 “He thought about his life but there was no life to think about”. Continuing in his poor state he eventually passes on page 281 the page that inspired me to track their conditions.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy is a masterfully written novel that delves into many themes, like human nature, good vs. evil, relativism, and dreams. The theme I chose to make my lit log about is the dreams and how they reflect the man and the boy’s journey. In making my lit log, I wanted to take Cormac McCarthy’s writing and interpret it visually. I wanted to show the chronological progression of the dreams as the story went on from the cave dream at the very start of the book to the boy’s dream nearing the end of their journey. I decided to depict each dream in rough, worn drawings to match the dead post-apocalyptic world the story takes place. I achieved this by using chicken scratch, loose line work, and sketching pencil techniques. I also edited the drawing’s contrast, exposure, and color to get my envisioned look. Each dream is numbered in chronological order, with dotted arrows winding and pointing between each dream to depict the descending and winding nature of the story. Each dream represents a checkpoint on the road of how the man or the boy interprets what they have been through unconsciously. I decided to draw the man with an obstructed face to depict his moral ambiguity. I decided to draw the boy with simple cartoon features to show his innocence throughout the story. As you can see at the end of the path in the drawing, I didn’t illustrate the last quote, as the last dream mentioned in the story was not described. I did this on purpose to represent the end of the last piece of escapism, fading into an exchange of words.

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Throughout The Road, the man and the boy constantly find corpses and limbs scattered around the country. In our map, we have shown their travels and what they have encountered while scavenging for supplies. They first come across a RV littered with corpses that were rotted and dried. Then, they came across a pool of blood and guts inside of bushes in the woods. After that, while scavenging the father found a walk-in cooler full of corpses. They continued moving after that and eventually found a field full of rotted human heads on spikes. After going into a house, the man and the boy discover a man on a mattress missing his legs with the stumps burnt and black. After escaping the house and doing more scavenging, they find a corpse floating in the water that flooded the basement. They then find a decapitated human head in a store. Moving from there, they had a run in with the roadrats where they found an infant gutted and being roasted on a spit. Lastly, they discover bodies burnt and mummified on the road itself which they have to walk through. These bodies that they discover tell us a lot about the world and how society has fallen. It also says a lot about how the environment is destroyed and how humanity was infected. When the world was dying, firestorms swept through and burnt people alive. That is what the man and the boy discovered on the road with the mummified corpses. Every other corpse or body part they found after that had signs of humanity. People began eating other people, even babies. They stuck each other’s heads on spikes and stuffed bodies in freezers. It shows what humans will do when they are pushed to their limit and what they do to survive. The death and destruction in the story represent the fall of society and the loss of morals. It is a dying world filled with the worst of humanity and the death of innocence.

The novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a timeless piece of literature that puts into question numerous aspects about morality and human nature as we know it. The setting takes place in an abandoned version of the Earth, coated with ash and debris everywhere the main characters, the man and the boy, turn. Throughout the novel, the two characters are forced to make heavy decisions that will not only change their present and future, but will also affect their righteousness. The boy, who is the son of the man, is often seen as compassionate and empathetic no matter the situation. His behavior is striked as out of place as the norm of their current environment is every man for himself and doing what you have to do to survive. This can be observed in multiple senses such as when the boy saw another child in the road who was alone and begged his father to help him, and another where a stray dog followed the man and boy for miles causing the boy to plead with his father to share their food with the animal. The child is so upstanding that his father frequently compares him to God, stating “If he’s not the word of God, God never spoke.”(5) The boy’s compassion is so strong that it gives the impression that it is unwavering, but that is false.

As the novel progresses, we see the light in the boy’s eyes begin to dwindle, his father saying “Something was gone that could not be put right again.” (136) Readers can see the mental as well as physical change in the boy as he begins to more closely resemble his father’s vocabulary. He begins to act like the man, think like the man, and even ideas that the boy was so against in the beginning of the book, he now finds himself rethinking.

This is exactly what I have decided to make present in my moral map. I have taken my top quotes from the book that I believe have contributed to the moral changes of the boy, and mapped them in a circle around a pistol and a fire. The pistol is meant to represent the ride of morality’s final destination, when the father died and the boy began to use the gun as protection, which is an act he did not understand before. Then, the fire is meant to constitute as the boy “carrying the fire” as the man would always say. The quotes and symbols are surrounded by a sad and gray environment with trees of ash.

The man’s past is something the book briefly touches on compared to some of the other themes but It is just as important. We never get a full summary of his life before but instead, we get moments and glimpses into his life that help us understand his actions in the book, and what he is teaching the boy. In my map, I split his memories into ones about childhood, love, letting go, and the world. The gray bubbles are the man’s thoughts on memory, the quote “Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget” tells us how to interpret the things that he recalls, that these are not things he wants to remember”(12).

He avoids remembering his past so much there was even a movement where he takes out his wallet and left his every possession from the time before, even a picture of his wife. This is then immediately followed by his and his wife’s last interaction, a painful and sorrowful memory of her leaving him and the boy. In the book, this is the largest piece of his past we get and this is probably an event that plagues the man every night, he wonders why he is even still going and maybe agrees with the wife’s point that “The one thing I can tell you is that you won‘t survive for yourself“(57). Her words cut him deep like a blade.

Cormac McCarthy has used memory in this book to show how the man is struggling to understand this seemingly new world he is in, except this is not a new world at all. He does not just get to forget even though he left his stuff behind, instead his memories become his penance and it somehow becomes easier to live in this bleak, colorless reality. It is unclear whether the last passage is the man’s memory but it tells us that destruction is the pattern that leads to life, and this is a cycle that no one can escape.

“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy is a haunting and dystopian novel that depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which a father and son navigate a desolate, gray landscape struggling to survive. The novel’s color palette is seemingly dull and barren because of the ash covered environment. However, there are a few significant instances in which vibrant colors make an appearance in memories, dreams and storytelling. To interpret these colors, we created a color wheel of scenes in color to illustrate the unique color palette of the story and how these scenes are significant to the overall meaning and conveyal of the story. The most significant color on the wheel is the muted gray that pervades the novel. This gray reflects the ash covered world symbolizing the aftermath of the catastrophic event leaving earth lifeless and dry. The absence of color underscores the bleakness of the characters’ surroundings and the harsh nature of their journey. In the wheel there is orange which represents the sun and description of the snow. “Everything was alright. As if the last sun were returning at last. The snow orange and quivering”(31). The red represents the blood on the snow from the man’s illness, “On the gray snow a fine mist of blood”(30). The pink signifies “A thin rose gown that clung to her breasts” (131) that was depicting the woman in one of the man’s memories. The green speaks bride coming out of a “green and leafy canopy”(18). The white represents “combs of ivory and combs of shells” (18). The black signifies “where lay a black and ancient lake” (1). Blue being used to describe “He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him”(5). Finally, gray represents the “still grey serpentine of a river” (6). The color wheel interpretation highlights the occasional appearance of color throughout the novel. The novels palette becomes a nuanced representation of the character’s journeys, emotions and fragile beauty that coexist with the barren world.

The element we chose to explain further and analyze would be Memories. The closest thing to a clear explanation provided in this book is what we learn through flashbacks and dreams. Using our map for guiding this landscape, we chose six stops that each took a look into the aspect of memories, showing the author’s intention to observe how a human mind would work in a world like this.

“Early Memories of His Wife,” takes us back in time to introducing to a past character. A character who must have played an important role in the father’s life is introduced to us on page 18 “In his dreams, his pale bride came to him out of a green leafy canopy. Her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white.” This quote shows how memory is very limited. Through this dream, we can get a glimpse of the man’s brain as we see flashes of a world that was once vibrant with life but is now only a memory.

Stemming off from that is the “Introduction to Boy Dreams” we enter the boy’s dream world, which is primarily shaped by scary dreams. We believe that McCarthy purposely did not include details of these dreams to point out the Boy’s resistance to telling his father about them. The boy’s character is then deemed weaker but it also shows how truly alone these two characters are in the relationship that they have formed.

The boy’s dreams and the man’s memories clash at the third stop, “Intersection of Memories and Dreams,” which creates a connect between the past and present. This is an important spot that influences not only the characters bond but also the path of their difficult journey across The Road. The quote “The cold of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a lot. Recite a litany. Remember.” (31), shows the connection to their emotions. The “cold” stands for the bad reality of their situation, something that has a constant sense of suffering. And the phrase “moved something in him long forgotten” refers to an awakening of his memories, a part of him that had been buried by survival and time.

“Flashbacks to the Past,” is where McCarthy uses flashbacks to piece together bits and pieces of the man’s past and then connect to the present. The character’s current state of emptiness is very different from these flashbacks. The way the author writes acts as a way of shifting readers from the depressing present to the happy past where everything is in good shape and not the constant battle of survival.

“Colors in Dreams vs. Reality,” shows the author’s difference between the colors in dreams and the dark and gloomy world. McCarthy does this by using expressive language and vivid imagery. We come across a quote in the book that says, “and the dreams so rich in color. How else would death call you?” (21) This quote mixes the deep meaning of reflecting on death with the life of dream colors.

Finally, and at “EndPoint”, dreams and memories both serve as a deeper look of human nature and story elements. After exploring the challenging roads of a world in collapse the characters find themselves standing at the endpoint, which is the point where the past and future meet. Here, the detail of dreams and the depth of memories combine to provide a window into the strong human spirit.