“He’d carried his billfold about till it wore a corner-shaped hole in his trousers. Then one day he sat by the roadside and took it out and went through its contents. Some money, credit cards. His driver’s license. A picture of his wife. He spread everything out on the blacktop. Like gaming cards. He pitched the sweat-blackened piece of leather into the woods and sat holding the photograph. Then he laid it down in the road also and then he stood and they went on” (McCarthy 43-44).
This scene almost brought tears to my eyes. This billfold was a metaphor for the world before the apocalypse and for the man’s life before the apocalypse. He was throwing away everything that was his old life and that was the old world. By throwing out his billfold and leaving the picture of his wife behind, the man had let go of his old life, of his dead wife, of everything that the world used to be. It was really a turning point in the story for the man.
“This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up” (McCarthy 116).
All throughout the book the boy and his father called themselves the ‘good guys’. The man said is was because they carried the fire. They were the good guys setting out against the world and the ‘bad guys’. I think it is one of their reasons for carrying on. And a way for the man to remind the boy that they need to carry on.
“The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell” (McCarthy 152).
I really liked this description of the new world. I thought this was a pretty good summary of what this world looked like, of the way things had twisted and changed, the way the people had twisted and changed.
“They ate slowly out of china bowls, sitting at opposite sides of the table with a single candle burning between them. The pistol lying to hand like another dinning implement” (McCarthy 176).
I loved the imagery in this scene. The boy and his father sharing a meal together, a candle between them, eating out of china bowls. It seems like a nice image, and then there is the gun, a reminder of what the world is really like, of what the man and his son really face.
“Out there was the gray beach with the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it. Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a world unheard of. Out on the tidal flats lay a tanker half careened. Beyond that the ocean vast and cold shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the gray squall line of ash. He looked at the boy. He could see the disappointment in his face. I’m sorry it’s not blue, he said. Thats okay, said the boy” (McCarthy 181).
They finally make it to the coast, and it did not look like it once had. The man had always described it to the boy as this beautiful place with blue waves and a clean sandy beach. What they found was grey muddied water and a trash covered beach. It was just as destroyed as the rest of the world.
“Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery” (McCarthy 241).
This was the ending quote of the book. I thought it was an interesting way to end the book. From a broader point of view, rather than from the boy’s. Not exactly an hopeful ending, but not a depressing one either. The world would never be as it once had been.
Great work Julia
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