The Road

The Road1. There are no chapters, only missed possessive apostrophe’s,  and simply paragraphs with minimal exposition leaving a very spare writing style. Does this enhance or detract from your appreciation of events in the story? Why has the writer chosen to be so austere?

2. “This was the perfect day of his childhood. This the day to shape the days upon.” (p13) suggests that there was a time when life was good, at least to some degree alive, filled with nature unspoiled and people untrammelled by hostility towards each other. And that place was the lake at his uncle’s farm. Do you sense that this novel is allegorical or literal? How do you know as so few specifics are given, little exposition gives guidance.

3. Why has the writer chosen to keep the conversation about what has happened from the reader? Why does the boy only ask about what is happening now?

4. Imagery is used sparingly yet there are flashes of ingenuity in diction and descriptive flourishes. “He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination.” (p 15). How does this affect your impression of the action of the story? How does it define the authorial voice?

5. “He thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another. No one traveled this road. No road-agents, no marauders.” (p 17) What do you think may have been the historical truth?

6. Verbal expression is lacking as is the description of much of the interior life of the characters. One consequence of severe trauma is muteness. “They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen….We used to talk about death, she said. We don’t any more. Why is that?” (p57) What other gaps in the story do you find intriguing? Why leave so much potential plot depth from the storyline?

7. “Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each.” What suggestion is being made of the nature of these people and that they are a version of what “bad people” might be. What is the worst degradation of which they may be capable?

8. Should the man have shown more compassion and fought harder to save others along the road? This is an ethical question only an individual might answer. Why does the author not address it in his story?

9. Is this story in your view religious, quasi-religious, or void of any real evidence of existence of providence. Is the ending merely pious due to human mythologizing a purpose to the madness of existence?