Creating the World (if five days)

Big Themes:

Memory.
Memory is a theme that is brought up in the book The Road. I believe memory is used because it is something for the man and boy to think about since their is nothing in their lives now except for survival. The man has a lot of memories. One of his first memories could very well be the happiest passage of the book. The man is remembering being at the lake by his uncles farm. He describes a beautiful scene of a lake and trees and a boat. He ends this passage by saying "This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape days upon" (13). Even though the scene described in his memory is very happy it comes after the man says "You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget" (12). I think that this means that the father wants to forget his perfect day with his uncle because it makes him sad. It makes him remember how life used to be. Now however, the man and the boy really have nothing  to look forward to. I think the boy also doesn't like these memories. When the man tries to take him into his childhood home the boy is very scared and really wants to leave. I think for the boy these images are creating another world that is strange and mysterious to him and that he doesn't like.

The World of The Road:
The World McCarthy has created is very bleak and dark and sad. One of the passages that really caught my attention was in the very first paragraph of the book where McCarthy says: "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray than each one that had gone before" (3). This being one of the first sentences of the book really sets the tone for the whole book. You get a sense that this is bleakness and darkness beyond anything we could imagine in our life today. I think one good way McCarthy created this world through his writing was with sentence fragments and a lot of space between each paragraph. McCarthy says "Barren, Silent, Godless" (4). With these short sentences without any action or subject give a sense of being broken up. The Space also helps with that.

My Creation:

"He walked out through the woods to where they'd left the cart. It was still lying there but it had been plundered. The few things they hadn't taken scattered in the leaves. Some books and toys belonging to the boy" (70). I see this scene as a single shot from the mans point of view walking out of the woods. I would see a long level shot on the cart lying in a dirt road surrounded on all sides by a pitch dark forest. The camera would then zoom in slowly in on the cart and then to a few individual things that had been left behind by the people who ravaged it.