End Times (The Road part I)

Cormac McCarthy does a brilliant job of describing nothing. The bleak sameness of the empty, burnt landscape is evident in his constant, almost tiresome use of the words "gray" and "ash": "gray light"(p.4) "days more gray each one than what had gone before" (p. 3), "ashen daylight" (p. 5), "shuffling through the ash" (p. 6), and that's just from the first few pages. But his use of these words is only rivaled by the use of the phrase "the road." It is very obvious how much he uses it because the title of a book or movie in context always jumps out at you. He could have used more creative ways to describe the actual road, like using synonyms to avoid repeating the same word and sound better. The road itself represents hope. It is a path with an unknown end, and the father and son keep hope that they will always find some food further along the road. "The road," peppered across the pages, is a constant reminder of the hopefulness that is the central, sometimes invisible mood of the book, a theme that I'm worried is lost to the casual reader. I am an optimist to a fault, so I don't think I would kill myself if I were a survivor in this barren wasteland. Not that I would be exactly happy, but I feel confident that I could find some grain of beauty in the empty, ashen beach of the world. That would be all I needed to carry on.