The Road is a book about a man and a boy who live in a post-apocalyptic world. It is about their journey for survival. Throughout the book, their goal is to head towards the coast but there is no real reason to get there. They need something to look forward to. Without it they do nothing and just lay around without meaning. The central themes of the book are love and destruction. The bond between the man and the boy is very powerful and strong. It is rare and they have a deep understanding of each other beyond words. They value every second they spent together. Even though the world around them is chaos they manage to love each other unconditionally, and they need to. Without the child the man is nothing. And without the man the boy is nothing. The boy is the man’s warrant, his reason to continue. These two people keep going, they have nothing but each other yet they chose to live so they can be with each other just a little bit longer. They keep going and search for food and blankets; they keep rummaging through every house. They do all of this for love and to keep the other one alive. The chaos in this post-apocalyptic world is overwhelming. They find themselves in a depressing hopeless world where almost no one survives but crazy heartless cannibals that torture innocent people without remorse. There is a message that this is our future. We are slowly killing our planet and taking all it has to offer for granted. This is what we will become if we don’t take immediate action. This book could be considered a warning. It proves how careless we are and how we are actually capable of such things, that this really can happen. There is a contrast between the world that has become, with marauders controlling it all and the sweet boy who is nothing but good. He represents the innocence and all the people acting on making the world a better place. Our kids should never have to go through such a thing. It is sad that such purity would be forced to live in such a world, without knowing anything else. I can relate to the theme of love. There is only one person that I love more than anything else in the world and that is my little sister. I would give my life for her happiness. We understand each other beyond comprehension. And though we fight a lot, I know she will always be there for me. When I finished The Road, I could not help but imagine what I would do without her and the thought alone killed me. She is my other half and I would be lost without her. I love her.

2

The three motifs that stand out to me are “okay”, colors and dreams.  Almost every conversation the man and the boy hold ends with the word okay. This proves that they understand each other beyond the expression of words and can communicate with a simple “okay”. It means that even though there situation is not positive, they will prevail and be okay. Even if everything is going wrong, it’s all right because they have each other. It relates to the theme of love. These two humans are so close that if all else is disaster it will be fine, as long as they are together. There were few colors mentioned in The Road. There is grey, used to speak of ash cover planes. The ash represents everything that has become dead. The ash was found every place the man and boy came by, meaning that these ruins were universal. The ash shows that there is no hope left in the world. The only real colors were red and orange. The colors represent death as well, as they were those that the marauders wore. Yet the red and orange also represented the fire. “Carrying the fire” is a phrase used to signify that the man and the boy are still in control, that they deserve to live. It means that they are the good guys and will never and haven’t done anything wrong or immoral. As long as the carry the fire, they will survive. The fire represents their life, and when it blows out they will die. Dreams are constantly mentioned in the book. They are regarded as bad. The good dreams remind the man of how good life was, and how bad it has become. He might be afraid to dream of something good because it would make his perils seem worse. Where as if he didn’t have the dreams he would slowly forget and his life wouldn’t seem as bad as it really is. Or even if he only had bad dreams standards of what is good, would be lower, making their life seem better. Bad dreams are also shunned upon. When the boy has dreams he mentions that most are horrible. They strike him so much that he doesn’t even want to talk about them. Dreams are portrayed as a distraction that bothers the one that has them. No matter the type of dream the outcome will be negative.

3

There is a lack of punctuation, no commas, just as there is a lack of details regarding the identity of man and the boy. They can represent anyone. It is suppose to let the reader interpret them as whoever they choose. Lack of knowledge we have about the characters and about what had happened to bring it to such a disaster creates a mystery. The information given is sparse and so is the format of the book, without chapters and without punctuation. This allows us to focus, not on who the characters are, but on the themes and message, such as love and destruction. The dialogue is set up as if only one person is speaking. This relates to the fact that the man and the boy are so similar. It shows that it is not so important who is speaking since either one of them would have said it. The author sometimes modified phrases and made them grammatically incorrect on purpose. He may have done this to show that grammatical rules no longer mattered, just as in the story. In the devastation, there were no more rules. Killing and torture was normal and there was nothing anyone could do about it.

5

I would definitely recommend this book to the incoming ninth graders. The Road is a unique book, with an individual style and a great message. It tells a beautiful story with a striking ending. The love between the characters is inspiring, moving and it warms my heart. Their journeys and challenges are tense and gripping. You never know what to expect. They could run into road agents at any moment or get sick and die. These aspects intrigued me and kept me reading. They are what make the book so enjoyable. This is also a genre of book that we had not yet read in school, and it was interesting to explore. There are certain disadvantages to the book though. There are several scenes and passages that I was not able to fully enjoy and profit from. I was challenged by the vocabulary and long passages that were repetitive and boring. But over all I would prefer by far to have read this book than having read another one, such as Of Mice and Men.

I love the way Monet draws sunsets over the sea.

I really like this picture. I found it on the internet once, I forgot how though. To me it presents an obstacle. The red and yellow in the sky are our passions and the love that attracts us versus the sticks, that seem like spears, which are our fears that we tend to stay away from. In this painting the red is beyond the wall of spears. So we have two choices: to get over our fears and chase the red in our lives, or to walk away.

Taking care of me

You always were

And always will be

The only mom

Thats right for me.