Symbolism

1. Symbolism The Road 3ENT

2. Symbolism • Colour • The road • The trout • The fire

3. Colour Cues • What colours are present in the novel? • Why is there a decided lack of colour? • Why are his dreams in colour?

4. Grey Examples • Ash, snow, dawn, afternoon, light, sea/river foam, mist, sea. Quotes • “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.” • “The shape of a city stood in the greyness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.” • “He looked at the sky. A single grey flake sifting down.” • “The wet grey flakes … grey slush by the roadside.” • “…the stark grey world appeared again and again out of the night.” • “The chary dawn, the cold illucid world … A colourless world of wire and crepe.” • “The man squatted and looked at the grey and wasted figure under the tilted sheet of plywood.” Symbolism • Lifelessness, barrenness, corruption of the pure (snow), inevitability, monotony.

5. Black Examples • Water, blacktop (asphalt), dead trees, road, ice, stones, diesel smoke, burned effigies Quotes • “The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening… No sound but the wind in those bare and blackened trees… that cold autistic dark.” • “The black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash.” • “The fire was dead and black on the ground.” • “Dark of the invisible moon, the nights only slightly less black.” • “The thin black trees.” “The hot black mastic sucking at their shoes.” • “Sketched upon the pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim.” • “The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor.” • “Everything melted and black… Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling.” Symbolism • Death, isolation, stasis, invisibility, corruption, fear, a hostile world.

6. Blue Examples • Tarpaulin, sky (in dreams), “frail blue flame” of the lighter Quotes • “Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the end of the world.” • “And the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds.” • “Is it blue? ... The sea? I don’t know. It used to be.” • “I’m sorry it’s not blue, he said. That’s okay, said the boy.” • “He kept asking him about his shoulder, blue and discoloured from where he’d slammed it against the hatch door. It’s all right, the man said. It doesn’t hurt. We got lots of stuff.” • “…turned and lay holding the child, watching the blue flames through the plastic.” Symbolism • Hope, survival, safety.

7. Red Examples • Blood spray (coughing), scarves/clothing of marauders, balefires, forest-fires, snow in firelight, the boy’s birth (memory), lines on the map Quotes • “…stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned.” • “There fires burning high in the mountains and at night they could see the light from them deep orange in the soot-fall.” • “All wearing red scarves at their neck, red or orange, as close to red as they could find.”  • “On the grey snow a fine mist of blood.” • “The snow orange and quivering. The colour in it moved something in him long forgotten.” • “He held aloft the scrawny red body so raw and naked…” • “… this tiny paradise trembling in the orange light from the heater and then he fell asleep.” Symbolism • Obstacles to be overcome, the scarred earth, danger, comfort, the journey.

8. Yellow Examples • The boy’s hair, toy truck, brick hearth in father’s old home, gold scrollwork in memory of theatre visit with wife, items from the boat, the new man in the yellow parka at the end. Quotes • “He sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god.” • “They walked through the dining room where the firebrick in the hearth was as yellow as the day it was laid because his mother could not bear to see it blackened.” • “The boy found toys he’d forgot he had. He kept out a yellow truck and they went on with it sitting on top of the tarp.” • “He found a pair of yellow rubber seaboots… and pulled on the stiff yellow breeches.” • “Inside was a yellow plastic flashlight… a yellow plastic EPIRB…” • “The man that hove into view and stood there looking at him was dressed in a gray and yellow ski parka.” Symbolism • Rescue, hope for mankind, salvation, and some items represent a golden world that has gone and the redundancy of those items in this new world.

9. The Road – as a symbol Highways and interstates (and some minor roads) comprise the setting of this novel. (The characters do stop at a few houses, but these function as pauses in their journey.) The characters spend so much time on the road – and McCarthy describes the road so well – that it hovers over the novel as a major image. The road is a desolate, transient thing, full of danger (the "bloodcults"). In fact, it's probably useful to think of the road as both an actual, physical setting and a mental state.

10. The Road – as a title The title also highlights the book's theme of transience. Notice that the characters in The Road never stay longer than a week in any one house or shelter before getting back on the road. All the houses have been abandoned; domestic life has pretty much been obliterated.It's also worth thinking about destinations in the novel. If the title points us to the American highway, we should also ask just where the characters end up. Answer: it's possible they don't end up anywhere. Their goal of reaching the coast, some might say, turns out to be an empty one.

11. The trout McCarthy gives us pages and pages of violent imagery with only the brief and occasional respite, but the trout are really beautiful. So beautiful that we're inclined (along with quite a few critics) to call the novel's ending hopeful. Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs 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 the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. (390.1)Even though McCarthy states that these trout existed once, his description is so powerful that it makes us think they might still exist in some remote mountain stream. As if the world, from the maps on their bodies, could come into being again.

12. Fire Listen to the story of Prometheus. How does this relate to the idea of ‘carrying the fire’ in The Road? What does the fire represent, both literally and metaphorically?