The Road

Cormac McCarthy makes the feeling of hopelessness and doom very easy to feel in his novel The Road. although there are times when one gets a tiny glimmer of hope. one mainly just gets a feeling of dread from whatever the father and son are currently going through. I found one of the more alarming scenes in the the book to have been when they passed a lake while they were traveling down the road. They had just had had a night of fortune the night before when the father had found a ham and had cooked a part of it for him and his son. Now as they traveled down the road they passed a lake and the son spotted a dam. Upon questioning his father about he is told that the dam should last for many more years, but when the boy asks if there are any fish in the lake the father responds "No. There's nothing in the lake"(20). This gives us a view of how bad things are. In the father's eyes things such as dam's have not only survived the problems that plague the Earth, but are expected to out live the suffering people on it, and wildlife have all but died off. We get a brief since of hope when they spot the long lived dam. We feel that things might not be as bad as we had thought, but we are quickly brought back to the reality of the situation with the realization that all the life in the lake was gone. These with many other scenes in the book help to bring out the sheer since of hopelessness that the book possesses.