The road essay
Annotations for The Road
Quotes from The Road
Annotations
“Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened light poles whining thinly in the wind… He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the greyness like charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.” (9)
This is a brief section of the book that really goes into the detail of what the landscape looks like. It is an intense description of how desolate the landscape really is. It talks about charcoal trees as if they had been sketched across the land. This excerpt from the book is a great example of imagery and how it lets the mind depict how the landscape looks. “It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. Its snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single grey flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom. “ (16)
The wasteland is depicted even more when McCarthy describes the landscape as being a ashen scabland. When the boy tells the man it is snowing he looks up and grabs a flake only to find out that it is ash.
“What is that papa?
It’s a dam.
What’s it for?
It made the lake
…
It’s made out of concrete. It will probably be there for hundreds of years. Thousands even. (20)
This is a conversation between the man and the boy. It is talking about how the boy doesn’t know what the big concrete structure is and he is wondering what it is doing. This just shows how the boy doesn’t know much about the world because he was born post apocalypse.
“They backtracked and camped in the actual road and when they went on un the morning the macadam had cooled. Bye and bye they came to a set of tracks cooled in the tar... You know that, don’t you?
Quotes from The Road
Annotations
“Charred and limbless trunks of trees stretching away on every side. Ash moving over the road and the sagging hands of blind wire strung from the blackened light poles whining thinly in the wind… He got the binoculars out of the cart and stood in the road and glassed the plain down there where the shape of a city stood in the greyness like charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.” (9)
This is a brief section of the book that really goes into the detail of what the landscape looks like. It is an intense description of how desolate the landscape really is. It talks about charcoal trees as if they had been sketched across the land. This excerpt from the book is a great example of imagery and how it lets the mind depict how the landscape looks. “It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. Its snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single grey flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of Christendom. “ (16)
The wasteland is depicted even more when McCarthy describes the landscape as being a ashen scabland. When the boy tells the man it is snowing he looks up and grabs a flake only to find out that it is ash.
“What is that papa?
It’s a dam.
What’s it for?
It made the lake
…
It’s made out of concrete. It will probably be there for hundreds of years. Thousands even. (20)
This is a conversation between the man and the boy. It is talking about how the boy doesn’t know what the big concrete structure is and he is wondering what it is doing. This just shows how the boy doesn’t know much about the world because he was born post apocalypse.
“They backtracked and camped in the actual road and when they went on un the morning the macadam had cooled. Bye and bye they came to a set of tracks cooled in the tar... You know that, don’t you?