The Road, Reading Blog #1 - The Colors of the Wind

This novel is one of the most hopeless I've ever read. The setting, the plot, the characters -- all of the color and life in this world has dulled to gray. The tiny hopeful vignettes that pepper the story are surrounded and overcome by the general destruction at every turn. And if you don't believe that anyone would write such a sad and despairing novel, I have ample proof.

Let's begin with the setting, which is mainly centered around the titular road that they walk on, day in and day out. Roads, you know, are black, so this is a very fitting path for travelers in a world where nights are "dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before" (3). Indeed, the novel itself seems to follow this pattern, with pages more bleak each one than what had gone before, and with more convoluted syntax, too -- and missing apostrophes! Do you have any idea how insanely aggravating it is to be reading something that boasts of a Pulitzer, and a major motion picture, but lacks basic copy-editing? It's supposed to be a #1 National Bestseller, for Pete's sake! But no, the man "wasnt sure" and he "hadnt kept" (4). It gets better a ways in, when he says things like "Let's go" (17) and "it's too far" (20), but I really -- I really digress. Sorry. Like I was saying, the world is entirely colorless in its present state. It's all "ashen scabland" and "wet gray flakes" of snow with "gray slush" and worst of all, "Black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash" (16). It's entirely pathetic, is my point here. Really, the only bit of color is a ham that's "deep red" with blood, and that still looks "like something fetched from a tomb" (17) so it doesn't do much for the color scheme.

Anyway, I think that's enough evidence on the setting -- all of the descriptions of things becoming raw and black in the rain are too depressing to quote anymore. Let's talk about the man's dreams, instead, because those have whole rainbows in them, and nothing is covered with ash. He has dreams, and flashbacks, about almost everything, from the previous wonders of nature, to his old love life, and family memories from his childhood. And they're full of adjectives, with "yellow leaves" by a lake (13) and "a green and leafy canopy" for a bride (18). Really, these could be downright pleasant, happy memories for the man to share with his son or call up for strength in times of weakness -- but the dreams only serve to deepen his depression, and solidify his feelings of loss in his new reality. After recalling a nice romantic date, he thinks to himself, "freeze this frame. now call down your dark and your cold and be damned" (19). He's not happy to have lived -- he's cursing his damnation, as if he's already died and gone to hell. Maybe he has, because he can't be happy, can't appreciate his dreams, that he knows are "so rich in color" only because, well, "how else would death call you?" (21). I don't think death needs to call him at all. If not for his son, he'd already be there.