The Road, by Cormac McCarthy

The Road, a post-apocalyptic, survival skills fiction book written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006 is part of the Oprah Winfrey book club. During an interview with Oprah, McCarthy answered questions about The Road that he had never been asked before because pervious to the interview he had never been interviewed. Oprah asked what inspired the heart breaking book; it turns out that McCarthy wrote the book after taking a vacation with his son John. While on the vacation he imagined the world fifty years later and seen fire in the distant hills. After the book was finished, McCarthy dedicated it to his son, John. Throughout the book McCarthy included things that he knows he and his son would do and conversations that he thinks they may have had. (Cormac). Some question if the book is worth reading for college course writing classes because of the amount of common writing “rule breaks”. After reading and doing assignments to go along with The Road, I strongly believe that the novel should be required for more college courses such as Writing and Rhetoric II. McCarthy wrote the book in a way to force readers to get out of their comfort zones; the book has a great storyline; so doing the assignments are fairly easy, and embedded in the book are several brilliant survival tactics.

McCarthy wrote the novel in ways that force readers to remove themselves from their comfort zones. He wrote The Road with a lack of punctuation that can make things somewhat confusing for readers. Some critics find that without quotation marks it makes the book hard to follow. But when I read the book I found that after the first fifty pages I understood when the characters were speaking. Finding that I had to pay a little more attention didn’t bother ...

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... to read, there are front of your seat moments, sad, and happy moments that the related topic books don’t have. The DK Handbook doesn’t have a storyline and is nothing but information. Fewer students should complain about reading a novel when the alternative is reading a book full of nothing but information. The Road is worth reading in more than just college classes, maybe high school classes should read it; even more novel reading fans should pick up The Road and try to set it down after fifty pages because it isn’t easy!

Works Cited

Cormac McCarthy Bombs on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’. Vulture , 6 June 2012. Web. 28 Jan. 2014. .

E Notes . N.p., May 2008. Web. 2 Feb. 2014. .

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.