...and I'm at the point where the father and son have discovered the fallout shelter. Part of me really wants to stop reading and say "They spent the winter there, and when they came out all the cannibals had starved to death. They went south and lived happily ever after."
Should I do this? Or should I keep reading? Because I just know something horrible is going to happen to one of them.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
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If you're looking for happy endings you should ignore pretty much anything by McCarthy.
ReplyDeleteI'm not the kind of person who HAS to have a happy ending, but if it's going to be a tragedy, I want it to be in service to the story and not just to reinforce the theme that "This is a crapsack world and there is no hope and everything good dies."
ReplyDeleteI guess I want to know if the little boy lives or not. It's one thing if his father dies protecting him; it's another if the boy is killed and eaten. You know? One is about parental duty and sacrifice for the next generation; the other is "Everything you love is ruined."
I just checked a synopsis. If I haven't been mislead by how brief it is, you may proceed without fear of an "Everything you love is ruined" situation.
ReplyDeleteDidn't read the book. Saw the movie. Ending is mixed in the movie.
ReplyDeleteBut was your synopsis for the book, or for the movie?
ReplyDeleteKeep reading, the book kind-a-sorta has a happy ending depending on your personality.
ReplyDeleteThe stated theme of the book, by the author, is hope.
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty much the same. Although there is, as usual, something special about the book that the movie doesn't quite get.
ReplyDelete"hope" as in "I hope I die a death of starvation or just a nasty case of pneumonia instead of getting eaten by cannibals" :)
ReplyDeleteSo yeah, none of these responses are really encouraging me to keep reading.
ReplyDeleteI want whatever drugs McCarthy is taking to make this depressing tome's message resemble hope.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, I enjoy a good post-holocaust story. Much like with zombies, I can say "Okay, if I were in this situation, I'd do this and that and the other thing."
ReplyDeleteWhereas with The Road, it seems that no matter what I'd do, I'd be dead. My only choices are the speed and agony of my demise.
It's been a while since I read it. Post apocalypse is allowed to be bleak, but he's created hopeless. All life but humanity is wiped from the face of the earth and we have stored food and each other to eat until we're out of both. Show me the hope in that, sir! I hope that whatever disaster befell us is magically reversed in the same way it occurred? Even Book of Eli isn't this grim about the chances and it's pretty damned bleak.
ReplyDeleteIf a book's theme really is hope then I should be able to close it after reading the final page and not be thinking about suicide!
See, I enjoyed The Book of Eli, so that gives me a really good example of what to expect.
ReplyDeleteThey live happily ever after in the fallout shelter, then.
I actually quite liked The Road... On the other hand, I also read a lot of 40k. And there was a kind of happy twist at the end. YMMV.
ReplyDeleteSuch is the essence of life itself... no matter what you do at the end of it all, you will be dead.
ReplyDeleteThere are more choices presented in The Road: Are you One of The Good Guys or One of the Bad Guys?