The End of the Road

The ending section of the road brings answers to some questions that arose along the way. The main one that I had been wondering about was the little boy that the man's son had seen as they passed through a city.
As they were stopped in a city in the first half of the novel "the boy was sitting on the steps when he saw something move at the rear of the house across the road. A face was looking at him. A boy, about his age" (84). In this area the boy also "heard a dog bark" but the father did not (82). The boy begins worrying about the little boy he saw and the dog he heard, saying "we could take him and we could take the dog... and I'd give that little boy half of my food... what about the little boy?" (86).
Shortly after,  the man 'explains' that the boy wasn't actually hearing a dog, he was remembering one. "The dog that he remembers followed" the family for two days, but in the end they just left it, and "that is the dog he remembers. He doesn't remember any little boys" (87). This shows that the man thinks his son is hallucinating, or something of the like, which makes the reader worry for the boy's mental health.  Which is a valid worry, seeing as he'll grow up in a world with no legitimate life other than a few starving humans and no company other than his father.
However, in the last section of the book this worry is settled. When the man dies, the boy "stayed three dayss and then he walked out to the road and he looked down the road and he looked back the way they had come. Someone was coming" (281). The man that is walking towards him is "one of the good guys," he and his wife "have a little boy and... a little girl" and they take in the boy to go with them. This explains the young boy that the little boy saw at the beginning of the novel. This also means that the little boy will have more people to talk to and play with, and the reader is relieved knowing that the boy will continue to live and grow with this new family.

The Last Stretch

The last chapter (page 231 to the end) of The Road was beautiful. Of course, the entire book was beautiful, but the last chapter was just amazing. I loved this book from beginning to end, but I still cannot get over how elegant the last section was.
My favourite passage from the end of the book is on page 261 where the man walks out into the road and ponders their lives, the world, and the past:

"He got up and walked out to the road. The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again. What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth" (261)

First, there are many words in this which I was unfamiliar with:
Cognate: similar sounding
Imponderable: impossible to guess or assess
Salitter: the essence of God

McCarthy first describes the earth. The "sound without cognate and so without description" rumbles from beneath the man's feet with no explanation other than "the earth itself contracting with the cold" (261). This shows how the world has stopped making sense to the man, it is its own creature now. Weary and dying from human abuse, this creature is left growling and attempting to recover, yet free. As "perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made," we can only see something truly once it has gone (274).
Then the man walks out into the road and stands, listening to "the silence. The salitter drying from the earth" (261). At first this was meaningless to me, but once I looked up the meaning of salitter, I fell in love with these two short sentences. It means "the essence of God drying from the earth." This is why I love McCarthy's writing, its like poetry. Its so beautiful. God comes into to the story frequently nearer to the end of the novel, an example being when the two protagonists shoot the flare gun and the boy asks, "they couldn't see it very far, could they, Papa?" and as the man wonders who the boy means by "they" he offers,"like God?" and the boy responds, "Yeah. Maybe somebody like that" (246). However, the sentence from the above passage says the exact opposite: that everything God was and is is leaving the earth, drying up and dying with the rest of nature. The man realizes this as he is going to die, and perhaps worries about the Godless world in which he leaves his son.
In an allegorical sense, this could relate to our world in that McCarthy believes God is in nature. As life in the plants and animals dies out, so the essence of God dries up from the very soil of the earth. In this way, if we wish to worship God (or some other deity) we must worship and care for the world in which we live in order to keep the holy essence alive.

Things Just Cannot Grow

Mina posted recently connecting and MGMT song to Cormac McCarthy's The Road.  Her connections made so much sense, I had never thought that The Road could be connected to a modern electric-ish song. I thought this was such an original idea for a reading blog, I decided to try and do something similar. Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles made  a song called Winter Song which also relates to Cormac McCarthy's novel.
The song begins slowly with the repetition of sounds, much like the beginning of The Road with the repetition of words and monochromatic landscape.
With "My voice a beacon in the night/My words will be your light/to carry you to me," Winter Song calls to mind the dreary nights that the man and the boy experience on their journeys, and the way the two main characters keep each other alive by giving the other a reason to live: by being the other's "light" in the gloom of the dead world. 
The next verse, "they say that things just cannot grow/beneath the winter snow/or so I have been told. They say were buried far/just like a distant star/I simply cannot hold" relates very directly to McCarthy's novel. Nothing is able to "grow beneath the winter snow" that covers the dead world of McCarthy's novel. The world appears "buried far, just like a distant star" that has died and been lost while the rest of the universe moves along as normal. 
The following verse, "I still believe in summer days./The seasons always change/and life will find a way. Ill be your harvester of light/and send it out tonight/so we can start again" connects to the hope that the little boy feels for a better life after they reach the coast, or even just the little boy that he thought he saw in one of the cities. This verse is in contrast to the feelings of the man, who has little hope for a future in which "the seasons always change" and little faith that "life will find a way" yet doesn't have the heart to break the spirit of his son. 
The singers continue, "the storm is coming soon/it rolls in from the sea" which connects to the fact that the man and boy and heading towards the sea, but they don't know if what they find there will have positive or negative outcomes for them. 
Between verses and at the end of the song a single phrase is continuously repeated: "is love alive?" This is quite a question for Cormac McCarthy's novel because, although everything in the world is dead, the love between the man and his son is most definitely alive.