Close reading a passage from The Road

  I want to try something that I haven’t done in a long time. I am going to attempt to perform a close reading of a passage in a novel. I have recently started rereading Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road . This is a book that I have read multiple times. I first read this in a class on postmodern literature while I was in graduate school pretty soon after the novel had come out. I had not had a lot of experience with McCarthy, having only read (poorly) Blood Meridian . I have reread that novel since then and have read a lot more of his work in general. The Road is a novel worth reading in its own right for the stylistic choices that McCarthy makes that break from some of his earlier work. The novel is stripped to the bone. The main characters of the book do not even have names. McCarthy’s prose focuses either on spare descriptions of the wasteland that the character cross or on action that moves the narrative forward. The pacing is plodding and relentless, but meandering, mirroring the action of the main characters as they move forward toward an uncertain and unreachable goal. The passage that I have selected comes early in the book and it is one of the rare scene-setting descriptions. If this is a first read, the reader is still getting used to the spare prose and is learning the rules that McCarthy sets up. Here is the passage in its entirety: They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon a roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use. Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden. The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof. He crossed to the desk and stood there. Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father’s house in that long ago. The boy watched him. What are you doing? he said.   - The Road , McCarthy pp. 6, 7. The first thing that is immediately apparent is the cadence that McCarthy establishes. Aside from the two lines of dialogue in this passage, we see description of the desolate scene alternating with short sentences describing action. These sentence develop a staccato rhythm with a lot of sentence variation, which is surprising because the passage gives the impression of a series of very short sentences. The longer sentences feel wavering and uncertain. Many of the longer sentences end in a different place than the reader might expect. The short sentences tend to be fragments that punctuate the longer ones and divide the elements of action, alienating them from lived experience. The entire passage works to distance the reader and experience anew the familiar scene of a gas station. As with Hemingway’s prose, the style and rhythm seem to encourage a fast reading, but the reader is rewarded for slowing down and paying attention to the subtle variations in the prose. This passage marks the first movement that the man and the boy make in the novel. So far, the man has awoken before the boy and has looked out over the land around them. McCarthy has not given up very much yet. The reader knows that a man and boy are sleeping outside and that they have their belongings with them in a cart. They know that the world is somewhat similar to ours but there is something wrong. From here on out, I am going to assume that the reader has some familiarity with the novel and will not explain context except where necessary. The opening sentence of this passage defines the scene that the passage will encompass and sets the scene early for what the rest of the novel will be like. The detail of crossing the river by an old concrete bridge contrasts with the ellipsis of “a few miles on,” as if a few miles of walking is nothing to be noticed. The phrase “they came upon” further elides the action of walking. The pair did not walk  up to or encounter the station. They didn’t see the station before finding it. The wording to “come upon” suggests happenstance, or a blundering into. It is not passive voice but it makes their actions passive and puts the focus on the gas station rather than on the characters walking toward it.  We then come across the first (in this passage) declarative description of action, “They stood in the road and studied it.” This sentence does at least two things. First, it reestablishes the characters’ action. They study “it” and it establishes their location in the road. But the wording here is also ambiguous and could either mean that they are studying the gas station or that they are studying the road. The assumption is that the pair are studying the gas station since that is the focus of the passage so far, but the novel is titled The Road and is, if nothing else, a study of the metaphorical road that the pair are on.  The next sentence is just the second instance of character speech in the novel so far and it helps to establish the patterns of speech that will pervade the rest of the novel both thematically and syntactically. Thematically, the characters do not speak much. They make a lot of statements about where they are and what they want to do. Their speech matches their action: both are stripped down to a functional minimum. The characters do not have the energy to waste action, they preserve energy at all costs because food is scarce. Likewise, their emotional reserves are drained and their speech is limited to the necessary. Syntactically, McCarthy chooses to ditch any differentiation between speech and text that the reader would expect. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce will use a single quotation mark, a leading en-dash, or even a line break and indent to separate character speech from exposition. McCarthy does none of these and embeds speech in the body of the text, leaving the reader to figure out where the speech starts. Until the reader gets used to this convention, this can cause a lot of doubling back once they realize that a sentence is character speech and not narration. This can cause doubt in the act of reading as the reader learns that they cannot trust the landscape of the text. The usual signposts that they are used to seeing that indicate character speech and the like are absent. This puts the reader into a similar frame of mind as the characters who are equally unable to read the stark landscape that they see in front of them. The “take a look” that follows is also ambiguous in the sense that it may either mean a development on the preceding thought the man declares that they should “check it out” together, or it could be an imperative to the boy that the two “take a look.”  The difference in meaning here is slight, but this ambiguity builds on the syntactical ambiguity of the lack of indicative punctuation.  The next sentence also subverts the action of our travelers. The passive voice in the weeds “falling to dust” suggests the forward motion of the man and the boy without narrating it. “Fording” the weeds suggests the neglect of the roadside and the degree of disrepair it has fallen into. This also builds upon the theme of a world that is not only abandoned but deeply damaged. In a world in which humans have simply died off, we would expect that weeds would grow but would be healthy. The fact that weeds are falling to dust at the touch of a human leg demonstrates the disease of the new world. Contrast the passive voice of fording weeds with the active voice of crossing asphalt. This is the alternating punctuation that I mentioned above. McCarthy gives the reader a short narrative sentence that shows positive character action only to subvert this, once again, with a passive sentence about the cap of the tank. The “cap was gone” subverts agency again. No one lost or stole the cap, it is just gone. McCarthy does this throughout the novel. He robs his characters and the dead people of this world agency by showing all of these objects as having been acted-upon rather than showing the actions that lead to their current condition. This sentence is interesting because McCarthy mixes the passive with the action. “The cap was gone” contrasts with “the man dropped to his elbows” to shift from inaction of the world to action of the man. This forces the world into a position that is not only acted upon, but left in the past. The man takes action in a world that has already been acted upon by others. This creates a paradox in which the action of the man may also be seen as inaction or as futile. The tired man inspects the worthless world he finds himself in. He is doing his best to be active in a dire situation but there is no sense of productive action because he is only really left with reaction. The odor of gas is only a “rumor” here because the world has already gone before him and already acted. Rumor is a way of speaking about the things we suspect but don’t know. Throughout the novel the man will presume to know what signs around him mean but will be mistaken. This is not a matter of the man misinterpreting signs, but of the extreme nature of change that has taken place. The old signifiers do not hold. The tank under the gas station used to signify gas and movement but that is no longer the case. So the man stands and “look[s] over the building,” taking a different action when his expectations are frustrated. He is also alienated by the once-familiar. The hoses of the pumps “oddly still in place,” show the reader that there is an expectation of disorder. In the opening sentences of this passage, McCarthy throws the reader’s sense of expectation back and forth. The pair come across a gas station after walking miles beyond a bridge. The man tries to find gas but cannot, and the order of still-hanging hoses is an oddity. What the man expects to find there — gas, disorder — is not.  After this, McCarthy begins a series of descriptions that hang isolated in sentence fragments that will follow the rest of the passage. “The windows intact,” seems to indicate another oddity of order in a disordered world. One would — the man would — expect the gas to be gone, the hoses to be in disarray, and the windows to be smashed. Only some of these things are true. We get another sentence describing action in the midst of this disarray as the man enters the building and then another sentence fragment describing the toolbox.  This brings the reader back to another short narrative description. But the toolbox is orderly, containing the tools one would expect to find in a gas station garage but have been left behind. The tools of an older age are no longer useful. These tools are “purposive” but without purpose. That is, we can see (or remember) the use to which these tools could be put, but they lack a clear present purpose. The sentence fragments describing these tools highlights the fragmentary nature of these elements that the man sees but can no longer see the purpose of. The tools become aesthetics rather than instruments. The man recognizes the former-utility of the tools, the “good half-inch drive sockets,” and the ratchet. But he leaves them behind because the tools are relics of the lost world. The man will not be working on cars, cannot see a use for them, and will not allow them to weigh him down because he cannot see a future use for them. The reader is likewise thrown into a limbo between worlds and sees the edge on which the man stands between his worlds. The unspoken contrast here is between the narrated perspective of the man and the unnarrated perspective of the boy. The man sees remnants of the old world and all that they signify. But the boy’s unspoken perspective would reveal an unfamiliarity with all of the signifiers of the old world. The reader gets whiplashed again in the rapid movement between fragmentary description, action, and fragmentary description as McCarthy moves between, “Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A metal barrel full of trash.” McCarthy moves between narrative modes here as if in montage. Movement meets static images to create a collage or the sense of a scene without actually describing the scene, only the elements. This strategy of juxtaposition is one that McCarthy will utilize throughout the novel.  McCarthy continues this juxtaposition, moving from the action of the man going into the office of the gas station to another sentence fragment describing “dust and ash everywhere.” The reference to dust here recalls the falling of the weeds earlier in the passage. Adding ash here, however, changes the score a bit. McCarthy has established that the familiar world that we would recognize has fallen into neglect in the beginning of the novel through the reference to dust. Dust indicates disuse or abandonment. Ash is different; it is the evidence of burning. A world that is both dusty and ashen presents contrast between the static world of the abandoned and the remains of an active destruction. The mixture of dust and ash heralds a true catastrophe of destruction and then abandon. Or abandon and then destruction.  In the next sentence, we finally see mention of the boy again — the first time “they” crossed the broken asphalt. The passage has allowed the man to leave his traveling companion behind as he explores an abandoned building and its grounds. But the boy is passive, watching. And then we have more fragments, compounded by a comma splice. At the risk of sounding pedantic in what is looking like an already-pretty-pedantic reading, I want to explore this construction a bit. The sentence reads, “A metal desk, a cashregister.” It is almost as if McCarthy himself is becoming impatient with his descriptions. The two fragments no longer merit their own sentences but are combined. Cash register is condensed to become “cashregister” in a simulation of human speech elision. But this elision (of the sentence fragments and of the words) is almost poetic. It reminds me of the imagist poetry of William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens. Compare it with Ezra Pound’s poem “In a Station of the metro” which reads: “The apparition of these faces in a crowd:/Petals on a wet, black bough.” Granted, Pound’s formulation is more purposefully poetic, but the construction of fragmentary, passive action (indulge this for a moment) followed by a short listing of attributes in order to create the impression of a described image seems to operate in the same way that McCarthy’s push/pull narrative style of this passage does.  I have used the terms “montage” and “juxtaposition” to describe what I think McCarthy is doing in this passage and this novel, but this is a little bit deceptive because both of those terms are tied to a dialectic of interpretation. I don’t believe that there is a dialectic method at hand here but this is meant to be syncretic in nature. Here is what I mean approximately, the dialectic means to show growth through contrast. The montage or juxtaposition shows us contrasting images in order to spark our train of thought to think about the differences and why they exist. The theory heads will excuse my basic rendering of this, please. But I think what McCarthy is doing is giving us a plethora of images that do not necessarily contrast but are at skew angles to one another. That is, the collection of images build and build to become something new. I mentioned Ezra Pound’s imagist poem above, but he moved on to something he called “vortecism” after imagism (it never really caught on but that isn’t important here) which was supposed to build upon the static image to show the dynamicism of our world. This is my simplistic rendering of sycreticism here. The idea is that we build image on top or image on top of image or idea on top of idea on top of idea and these images or ideas never resolve . They build and build and add layer upon layer of understanding. McCarthy’s syncretic method is to add image upon image, but in different contexts. We get the fragmentary image of weeds, the fragmentary image of pump hoses in odd order, the fragmentary image of a toolbox and its contents, and all of these things add to something. Add in the image of a boy standing and observing all of these things that the man is observing, but his perspective is skew even from the man’s. This builds to a point at which the familiar is distanced from us. It is alienated and unfamiliar. This means that it wants to do the same thing that montage or juxtaposition does, but it goes about it a different way. Dialecticism implies a bipolarity: thesis and antithesis. Syncretism implies not just a contrast or a sliding scale, but a plane of difference. I am starting to pull from too many different sources here, so I will bring it back to McCarthy’s text. One thing emerges at this point that reveals McCarthy’s true artistry and that is the repeated use of the word “metal.” In this short passage, McCarthy mentions a “metal toolbox,” a “metal barrel,” and a “metal desk,” not to mention that tank, pumps, pipe, drawers, sockets, ratchet, and anything else the man may have come across that were made of metal. I think that this is all purposeful. Utilized metal as described in this passage is a mark of civilization and advancement. The world that the man and the boy live in are off the charts, historically speaking. This world represents a massive reversion from the late-capitalist world of 2006 America. Refined, usable metals in 2006 are so common as to be completely un-noteworthy. But they are remarkable things in The Road because these familiar signs are now vestiges. They are artifacts of a remembered world for the man and they are perhaps relics of a completely lost world for the boy. The metal of this world has purposiveness without purpose. To return to the text, the next sentence brings us: “Some old automotive manuals, swollen and sodden.” More relics of a lost age. When the gasoline is gone and the tools to repair cars have no purpose, then certainly the manuals are worthless as well. That they are swollen deepens their uselessness. They aren’t even purposive without purpose, they are not even purposive. They are just completely useless. The sentence, “The linoleum was stained and curling from the leaking roof,” is almost an imagist poem in its own right. It gives us an image that tells a story of neglect and disuse, the same story that has pervaded this entire passage. After this drudgery of description, we finally return to some action. The man “crossed to the desk and stood there.” We have another example of inaction masquerading as action. The main action of the sentence is to stand over a desk. But there is another distancing action here. McCarthy tells his reader of the metal desk and “cashregister” before veering off to describe the automotive manuals and the linoleum before veering back to the desk. The man’s actions are subordinated to meaningless, fragmentary description of objects in the room.  The last three sentences tell the actual story of this whole passage and we learn that everything up until now has been prologue to the main point. The man picks up the phone on the metal desk and calls a phone number that he knows will not be active. Or maybe the number is active and the whole system is down. We don't know. The action of the man calling his father’s house is farce. It is a performance for the boy because the man knows that the phone lines are useless, that his father is likely dead This is, again, a subverting action because McCarthy lives in the unnarrated moments. The man calls his father’s house “in that long ago,” and the reader is meant to think that this means the time before whatever catastrophe has taken place. But this is ambiguous. “In that long ago” might mean before the catastrophe, it might mean in the man’s youth, it might mean during the man’s lifetime but between his youth and the catastrophe, it might mean before his father died when he was a younger man. This is where I think the genius of authors like McCarthy and Hemingway and other may lie. McCarthy lives in ambiguity in this novel. While many authors live in specificity and providing detail that the reader can follow, this novel lives in the open spaces of interpretation. When McCarthy gives us ambiguous sentences, he is doing this to allow for a multiplicity of interpretation. What I think is really interesting is that there is a contrast in technique going on in this novel. On the one hand, we have this syncretic movement toward meaning. We have fragments that add one upon the next to build toward something. But on the other hand, we also have a proliferation of what this meaning is. In this passage, the boy is mentioned at the beginning and then we have a lot of focalization through the man. It isn’t until the end the the are even reminded that the boy is there. And this mention is truly just a mention, “the boy stood in the door.” He is inactive, he is watching. But the realization that the boy is there and watching, that his frame of reference is different from his father’s, that our own frame of reference matches up more with the man’s than the boy’s all collapse at once to remind us of how limited the narrative focus really is.  In the last two sentences we have a moment of revelation through a shift in focalization. A short declarative sentence noting that “the boy watched him” is followed by the boys question of what the man is doing. This is the end of the passage.  The boy doesn’t understand the man’s action, but we do not know the source of misunderstanding. The boy may be asking about the use of the telephone, why the man is putting on this show for the boy, asking if this is actually a show, or any number of other things. What is at stake here is the fact that there is literally a difference or worlds here. The boy, as we will learn in the novel, was born after the fall of the man’s civilization so he may not know anything about telephones except for what his father has told him. As I write this in 2024, I wonder what my daughter will know about the kind of phone that sits on a metal desk in an office. She already picks up oblong pieces of plastic and talks into them as though they were phones. She won’t know what a telephone is. Likewise, the kid in the book probably does not know what a telephone does or what it is for. Purposiveness without purpose. We end on a question of purpose. The boy does not know what the man is doing. This echoes one of the major themes of the novel. A theme that I think is largely unacknowledged. In this kind of fiction, dystopian or post apocalyptic,  or whatever we want to call it, I think that we miss a major point in what it looks like when a world changes. We see a lot of these novels written as a way of coping with change or discontent in our current world. Orwell wrote 1984 as a response to what he saw as authoritarianism creeping into socialism and other forms of government. Winston Smith reacts to an emerging new world. Fahrenheit 451 is pretty similar. Montag finds himself unable to perform the tasks he is assigned to. But in both of these novels, we the reader see the allegory. We get that this is a representation of things gone wrong, or as an extension of our contemporary society. Our knowledge is similar to Smith’s or Montag’s. We believe things that they might and want to correct what has gone wrong. But what happens in The Road is different. The boy doesn't know that lost world. There is an ironic structure that McCarthy forces us into. We have to know the world that we live in, the world that McCarthy presents, and also the world that McCarthy creates for the boy, which is completely different from the one that the man knows even though they occupy the same space. “What are you doing?” amplifies beyond just the question of the telephone. It asks the reader a question about what leads us to the boy’s world. What are we doing to bring about the world this boy lives in?