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In this episode, Erik Rostad discusses book 31 from his 2022 Reading List – The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Show Notes
- Author: Cormac McCarthy
- Purchase this book from Landmark Booksellers
- Blood Meridian Episodes
- Reading Resources
- Books of Titans Website
2 Comments. Leave new
(Erik, big fan of the show and big fan and customer of Landmark and Franklin). I’m glad you are latching onto Cormac. The paragraph you referenced I thought about. My impression that it combines perspectives of the boy and the dad and those that he went with after his dad died; at that scene they talk of the little boy. Who doesn’t remember the little boys? Who is asking the question? I like to think it is another character as the boy and his dad would not allow themselves to forget.
Hi Tim – hope to meet you some time at Landmark. Here’s one interpretation I came across that has me thinking:
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/295096-the-road-the-first-person-paragraph
Quoted from Goodreads page:
“The first bullet was used by the father to kill a boy for food. He thinks the boy doesn’t know. He thinks thinks the boy believes he killed the dog, though it is stated the dog was too skinny. This is why it shifts to first person. The father who usually operates in a very direct, emotionless, and calculated manner is rationalizing to himself. He is saying that the boy thought he saw a dog because of the dog that the boy thinks he killed. This is why he says to himself that his boy never saw the boy he killed. He is rationalizing to himself that the boy couldn’t know. This is also the unspoken reason the wife is killing herself, with obsidian, because as she says “we are the walking dead”. She sees the father has lost his humanity and is why she implores him to “cobble together a passable ghost”. She sees that he will do literally anything to keep his boy alive, even if it means degrading his own humanity.”