The Road Group

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Pre-lecture Questions

• Answer as many of the following questions

as possible in the next 5 minutes (leave

space; we will revisit these).

1. Who or what really is Ely?

2. Who or what does the Boy symbolize?

3. Of all the possible foods in the bunker, why

does the Boy choose a pear?

4. Of all the possible methods of moving their

stuff, why does McCarthy have the Man and

Boy use a grocery cart?

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THE ROAD

LECTURE TOPICS

• _{DREAMS & MEMORIES}

• _RITUALS

• CANNIBAL CROP CIRCLES

• THE ENIGMATIC ELY

• _{JESUS IN}

THE ROAD

• _{ALIENS IN}

THE ROAD

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Most of the man’s dreams recall lost pastoral, Edenic imagery.

First example: Eve (Botticelli’s Primavera depicting Venus)

“In dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. Her nipples pipeclayed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell. Her smile, her downturned eyes” (18).

“Memory of her crossing the lawn in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each

memory recalled must do violence to its origins” (131).

“He mistrusted all of that. He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languour and of death” (18).

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• _{This darkening, dying, myopic}

world underscores how lost the

paradise

of old truly is.

• _{The man literally sees the world}

being uncreated before his eyes.

• _{The man’s gesture of laying the}

photograph “down in the road” is a

renunciation and farewell.

• _{He’s lost his}

_Eve

_.

“He

dreamt

of walking

in a flowering wood

where birds flew before

them he and the child

and the sky was aching

blue but he was learning

how to wake himself

from just such siren

worlds. Lying there in

the

dark

with

the

uncanny taste of a

peach

from

some

phantom orchard

fading

in his mouth…Like the

dying world the newly

blind inhabit

, all of it

slowly

fading

from

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• The serpent (Devil/Evil) manifests itself in

dreams

&

memories

• As a boy, the man remembers how men set a

bolus of “serpents” on fire

– _{“…having no remedy for evil but only for the image}

of it as they conceived it to be” and as the snakes burn, “they were mute” and “there were no screams of pain” (159).

• men destroy image of evil, not the real thing

• We think we’re civilized by punishing evil but

it’s still there within us, lurking beneath the

surface. (EQ #1)

– _{“The screams of the murdered. By day the dead}

impaled on spikes along the road. What had they done? He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it” (33).

• Who’s responsible for the Fall: the Serpent

(D

evil

) or Eve (Man)? Responsible for the

End?

• evokes man’s destruction of the natural world

& reveals how language (“evil”) can obscure

truth

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RITUALS

• _{Ritual: 1.}

_{any practice or pattern of behavior regularly}

performed in a set manner

; 2.

a system or collection

of religious or other rites

.

• _{How does ritual keep us civilized?}

• _{“Since ‘culture’ has been destroyed in this narrative}

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• _{Domestic Rituals}

–

music: makes a flute for boy (77)

–

praying

–

_{Why a shopping cart?}

• _{feminine; father mister-mom}

• stark reminder of plenty

–

What is ritualistic about eating?

• 40 eating episodes in the novel

• _{candlelight dinner}

• _{serves meal in bone china bowls (206)}

• _{Claude Levi-Strauss: “in preparing food for…consumption, by symbolic}

understanding of the ritual character of eating, and by the evolution of table

manners, we crossed over from the wild to the tame, from nature to culture”

(Davenport 11).

• _{In contrast to biological counterproductive act of eating one’s child, which in}

itself resides ritualistic elements

• _{“Bloodcults” ritualize cannibalism to make it more acceptable/justifiable .}

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• _{In his essay “Nature,”}

Emerson

wrote

how

Nature can be viewed as

a

sacred

text

or

hieroglyph where man

finds “reason and faith”

through its “uncontained

and immortal beauty”

(487-488).

• _{McCarthy’s novel}

presents us with a very

different kind of

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• _{Etymology of Apocalypse: Greek}

apo-calyptein

, meaning to “unveil.”

• _The

_{Book of Revelation}

_{is in fact a}

vision/dream

revealing the end times

to St. John.

–

_{Must read/interpret the signs}

(7-headed dragon, Whore of Babylon,

4 Horsemen, 666)

• _{Paragraph #2 describes the man}

scanning the landscape and seeing

nothing but a tabula rasa—a landscape

bereft of many of its previously

defining features:

–

_{“…he glassed the valley below…}

Looking for anything of color. Any

movement. Any trace of standing

smoke…Nothing to see…Nothing”

(4-7).

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“The old text of the world is lost, a dead language

preserved only as a fading memory” (Edwards 57).

“The wall beyond held a frieze of human heads” their skulls

tattooed

with “runic

slogans

,

creeds

misspelled

,” some painted and

signed

across the forehead in a

scrawl

…He’d come to see a

message

in each

such late history, a

message

and a

warning

, and so this

tableau

of the

slain and the devoured did prove to be” (76-77).

“They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by

the roadside. They were signs in gypsy

language

, lost

patterns

…

hopeless

messages

to loved ones lost and dead” (180-181).

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• _{The state of language in}

_{The Road}

_is

described as “the sacred idiom

shorn of its referents and so of its

reality” (75).

• _{Man reads olds newspapers with}

references to that which no longer

exist (24).

• _{Man enters library whose volumes}

are soggy and useless on the floor

(158).

• _{Boy no longer studies the alphabet}

(206).

• _{Boy refuses to tell a story, not}

knowing any with happy endings

(226).

• _{How essential is the written word in}

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The Enigmatic Ely

• “There is no God and we are his prophets” (170).

• Biblical prophet Elijah is first introduced in the Bible in 1 Kings 17:1.

– Visits widow & her son with one meal left before death; they give him the meal and he saves them through God

• Elijah was responsible for the slaughter of barbarians who sacrificed human victims to their heathen god Baal.

– By the challenge of Elijah, "the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the holocaust, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench" (1 Kings 18:38).

• Elijah told the people, "I'm the only surviving prophet of the LORD…”

– “I dont think you should touch him…Don’t hold his hand…Dont hold his hand…” (165-166).

– 1 Chronicles 16:22: "Do not touch my anointed ones; do my prophets no harm.“

– touching Ark of the Covenant = death

– John 10:17: Jesus said to her, "Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God. “

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The Enigmatic Ely cont.

• The final mention of Elijah in the Hebrew Bible: "Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD." That day is described as the burning of a great furnace, "... so that it will leave them neither root nor branch" (Malachi 3:19).

• Traditionally, in both Judaism and Christianity, this is taken to mean the return of Elijah will precede the Messiah.

• Christ first appears in the Book of Revelation 1:17: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: "Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last” (Revelation 1:17).

• The Man asks Eli: "What if I said that he's a god?" (172).

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Jesus in

The Road

?

• McCarthy uses “advents” to describe birth of Boy

– Advent: arrival of something extremely important; liturgical period preceding XMAS; coming of Jesus

• Boy is 7 years old; apocalypse will last 7 years until Christ returns to vanquish Satan (Revelation)

• “Golden chalice, good to house a god” (75).

• “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God” (77).

• Old Testament: “I wouldnt have given you anything” (173).

• New Testament: Boy gives Ely food & supplies (173).

• Synthesize the above information. Who or what does the Man represent?

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Aliens in

The Road

?

•_Alien _(n)

1. a creature from outer space

2. a person who is not included in a group; an outsider

•_{“…But that wasnt what woke him. He’d been visited in}

a dream by creatures of a kind he’d never seen before. They did not speak. He thought that they’d been crouching by the side of his cot as he slept and then had skulked away on his awakening. He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed” (153).