Foreshadowing is employed on Page 62 through the boy playing
with his toy truck, McCarthy writes that the boy “made truck noises”, it is
used to build tension within the page as on the same page the man is said to
wake from the noise of a truck and people on the “cracked macadam”. This allows
the reader to look back and realise that the truck was foreshadowed by the boy
as seemingly moments before (almost a night, but due to contracted time it is
portrayed in seconds), the boy was playing with his toy truck on the same road.
The men in this sequence are shown to be unorganised, shown through their use
of “clubs” and “pipe” allowing them to be viewed as non military, the characterisation of the men also shows them to be
infected as it were shown through
their “coughing”. This suggests to the reader that no-one is seemingly safe
from whatever is destroying the world, as some of the men are in “canister
masks”, a “biohazard suit”, suggesting there is no escaping the death that has
befallen the land within the novel.
McCarthy uses the simile “lumbering and creaking like a ship”
when describing the diesel truck that has appeared on the road as it can be
viewed in a twisted biblical sense as the opposite of a saviour, as it is unlike in “Noah’s Ark” carrying men/weaponry/animals
that will not save/rebuild the world, but destroy it even further. On page 65
the man and the boy meet the Road Rat, he is described in much detail in my
opinion as it is the first character that they meet on their journey within the
novel, he also shows how desolate the human race has become, as for example
McCarthy describes him to look like “an animal inside a skull looking out the
eyeholes”, a very dark image.
The Road Rat is shown to be very explicit whilst the man is
very implicit as I believe it shows the diversity in intelligence between the
pair, this is shown as the man is indirect in saying he is going to shoot and
kill the Road Rat, shown in his line “yes they will, but you won’t” when
describing the gunshot to the Road Rat, whereas the Road Rat simply asks the man
if he “is a doctor”, suggesting he is not intelligent in the ways he gets
information. Through the man’s exchanges with the Road Rat on pages 67/68 it is
learnt that he is extremely intelligent through his impressive knowledge of the
human brain, shown in the line “you will need a frontal lobe and things with
names like colliculus and temporal gyrus”, it is inferred that he may have been
a doctor. However, on page 68 the Man performs a drop, roll and shot before
shooting the Road Rat in the middle of the head, this suggests that the man may
have had a more sinister profession than this is, as to perform this without previous
training etc. would be a virtually impossible task, the man may now be considered
to be FBI etc.
The line “A single round left in the revolver. You will not
face the truth. You will not” is the man seemingly echoing his dead wife’s words
earlier in the novel, I believe the Man utters these words in a futile sense to
punish his wife, but I believe they are equally said in a motivational sense,
this is because she has told him he cannot do it, but humans are programmed to
attempt to defy others expectations of them, meaning he may be saying in to
push himself to save his own and his sons lives to prove his cowardly wife wrong. It seems strange
that after killing their friend the other survivors do not attempt to find the man
and his boy, however this becomes clear on page 73/74 as the other men have
seemingly eaten their friend that the man and the boy had shot, this suggests
that the reason they did not give chase was because they did not need to waste
energy and risk being killed, as their next meal was laying there in front of
them, dead. This clearly shows the cannibalism and savagery that has taken over
the world in turmoil, and that friendships etc. no longer matter, but instead
murder and cannibalism are more prominent.
On page 68 the Road Rat is shot dead, the dead man’s “gore”
and “brains” go all over the young boys face, despite this it is not until page
77 (9 pages later) until we see the man wash the boy clean. In my opinion, this
is because cleaning the boy is not one of the man’s basic primal instincts, however
finding food, keeping warm and staying safe are. This shows the man to be
juxtaposed to his actions on the previous page, as he spoke about the brain
etc. with superior intellect, but yet is still basic enough to not see the Road
Rats brains all over his son as a situation that must be dealt with, nevertheless
it is still a fact that cleaning the boy is not as important to him as staying
alive. There is also a simpler explanation to why the man did not clean his
boys face, this is that he could simply find no water to clean the boy that did
not have a risk of killing him in the process, this is shown on page 15 as McCarthy
writes there is “black water running”, reiterating the point that it may be
hard for the man to find clean enough water to bathe his boy in, this still
links to the point that the man has to keep the boy safe and not put him in any
danger, else his wife would have seemingly been right in saying the man cannot
look after the boy.
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