Been meaning to try McCarthy. These days, I'll take sparse and lean over grandiose epics anyway.
The thing about children is, they're adaptable. Children who grow up in brutal environments full of nasty things and people out to get them adapt to that, too, and they learn how to survive. Or they don't, and they die. Watch The Wire some time, or a documentary about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Children are quite capable of coping with the fact that the world is full of grim and scary things. Their adaptation may be ugly, and their coping mechanisms may be fatalistic and erase anything resembling that fond conceit of our modern world known as "childhood innocence," but this boy should have long since become inured to dead bodies and cannibals. He should recognize the latter as a threat, certainly, but I didn't find his tearful quivering and need to be comforted by his papa credible -- this was the reaction of a soft child from a privileged existence, not one who has grown up in the post-apocalyptic savagery of The Road
Haven't read The Road, so this is just a general statement about fiction, but there's such thing as metaphor and allegory. If he had written The Road as a more "literal" story, using techniques that a journalist would have used to tell a real life story, the underlying psychology would not have changed. The soul of humanity remains the same--a scared child protected by an older, adult self, both the complementary halves of the same entity. One exists to protect; the other is the reason for the struggle. Whittle away a lot of post-apocalyptic stories, all those fancy plot details, and you get this. "Survival" and "the reason."
I liked Carrie though.
Been meaning to try McCarthy. These days, I'll take sparse and lean over grandiose epics anyway.
The thing about children is, they're adaptable. Children who grow up in brutal environments full of nasty things and people out to get them adapt to that, too, and they learn how to survive. Or they don't, and they die. Watch The Wire some time, or a documentary about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. Children are quite capable of coping with the fact that the world is full of grim and scary things. Their adaptation may be ugly, and their coping mechanisms may be fatalistic and erase anything resembling that fond conceit of our modern world known as "childhood innocence," but this boy should have long since become inured to dead bodies and cannibals. He should recognize the latter as a threat, certainly, but I didn't find his tearful quivering and need to be comforted by his papa credible -- this was the reaction of a soft child from a privileged existence, not one who has grown up in the post-apocalyptic savagery of The Road
Haven't read The Road, so this is just a general statement about fiction, but there's such thing as metaphor and allegory. If he had written The Road as a more "literal" story, using techniques that a journalist would have used to tell a real life story, the underlying psychology would not have changed. The soul of humanity remains the same--a scared child protected by an older, adult self, both the complementary halves of the same entity. One exists to protect; the other is the reason for the struggle. Whittle away a lot of post-apocalyptic stories, all those fancy plot details, and you get this. "Survival" and "the reason."
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