The Closing Lines at the End of The Road

As the year 2010 is drawing to a close, The Poplar Tree has decided to file one last post on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road…

At the very end of The Road the novel closes on an image of brook trout: “They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.”

In his closing prophetic lines, McCarthy is reminding us about the fragility of life and the brook trout image represents man’s knowledge of the world; everything we know about time and evolution can be held in the palm of our hand, and is symbolised by the patterns on a trout’s back. Humans unlike any other living being can trace its history and creation back to the earliest details, from the evolution of apes to bits of flint left for millennia under layers of earth in a cave.  It’s astounding to sit and think for a moment about how much history is bound to a little piece of flint or arrowhead – we can glean such a lot from such little things. At the end of The Road, the image of the brook trout is like the piece of flint on a cave floor because it too represents evolution, and more importantly, predates humanity itself.

Missing Thumbs in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road continued…

A couple of months ago The Poplar Tree composed a blog entry in response to the above question – since then there has been a phenomenal response and the comments beneath the entry run far below it. I encourage everyone to read the comment left this evening by ‘Kebman’ – it offers a completely new view on ‘missing thumbs’ which I hope will incite more debate. http://thepoplartree.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/a-few-thoughts-on-missing-thumbs-in-cormac-mccarthy%E2%80%99s-the-road/

A few thoughts on what caused the end of the world in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

How do you know if you were the last man on earth? He said.

I don’t guess you would know it. You’d just be it. [pg180]

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the end of the world begins with “A long shear of light and then a series of low percussions.” [p54]  The details are vague and could be applicable to a number of post-apocalyptic scenarios, but maybe they are the words of a man who witnessed the after-effects of a super volcanic eruption. In The Road, a Nuclear Winter has descended on an unspecified region of America and everything is left covered in a thick layer of dust, the sunlight cannot penetrate the clouds and everyday is as grey as a cloudy winter’s morning. For the ‘Man’ and ‘Boy’, the greyness is perpetual and even time itself has fled from the world, “The clocks stopped at 1:17.” [pg54] Calendars are no longer kept, the Man doesn’t know how long they’ve been travelling the road and there are no seasons or lasting referents to our concept of modernity. Everything they touch is the same – broken or dead, the world smells of ash or the sour stink of rotting corpses and the food which they eat is tainted and rotting.

A Few Thoughts on Missing Thumbs in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

The thumb is very versatile, it is a universal signifier which crosses language barriers and it’s the most flexible part of our hand; we use it to grip things, to steady the barrel of a gun as we take a shot, manacled in chains you would need it to turn a key in a lock. In Shakespeare, to bite one’s thumb was considered an insult, for children it’s a pacifier, for others (when sucked) it’s a sign of cowardice, there’s also the ubiquitous thumbs up – everything is a.ok. But in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, things couldn’t be further from the truth, because the thumb or rather lack of, signifies that something terrible has happened in the character’s past.