FNST 101 Lecture 1: The Road 英文版
13 Jun 2018
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Synopsis:
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's
masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the
ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and
when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast,
although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing;
just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the
clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food — and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in
which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world
entire," are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an
unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate
destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in
the face of total devastation.
The prose is quintessentially McCarthy: spare, desolate, unemotional, reserved of
both unnecessary vocabulary and punctuation (he recognized the necessary evil of
periods denoting the end of a sentence. Some contractions are so designated with an
apostrophe, some not. Exclamation points are avoided with the same vigilance as
would be shown to beanies with propellers). Although most English teachers I've
been a captive audience to would consider him Satan incarnate, he still can turn a
phrase of almost unbearable beauty.
THE ROAD
By
Cormac McCarthy
Copyright © M-71, Ltd. 2006
This book is dedicated to
JOHN FRANCIS MCCARTHY
When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to
touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more
gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma
dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He
pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and
blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream
from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the
hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable
swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone
flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth
and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a
great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature
that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with
eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the
water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked
and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its
bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head
from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and
loped soundlessly into the dark.
With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road
and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He
thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for
years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.
When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below.
Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the
blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among
the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing
smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and
wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he
just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the
land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of
God God never spoke.
When he got back the boy was still asleep. He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him
and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with
their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup.
He spread the small tarp they used for a table on the ground and laid everything out
and he took the pistol from his belt and laid it on the cloth and then he just sat
watching the boy sleep. He'd pulled away his mask in the night and it was buried
somewhere in the blankets. He watched the boy and he looked out through the trees
toward the road. This was not a safe place. They could be seen from the road now it
was day. The boy turned in the blankets. Then he opened his eyes. Hi, Papa, he
said.
I'm right here.
I know.
An hour later they were on the road. He pushed the cart and both he and the boy
carried knapsacks. In the knapsacks were essential things. In case they had to
abandon the cart and make a run for it. Clamped to the handle of the cart was a
chrome motorcycle mirror that he used to watch the road behind them. He shifted
the pack higher on his shoulders and looked out over the wasted country. The road
was empty. Below in the little valley the still gray serpentine of a river. Motionless
and precise. Along the shore a burden of dead reeds. Are you okay? he said. The
boy nodded. Then they set out along the blacktop in the gun-metal light, shuffling
through the ash, each the other's world entire.
They crossed the river by an old concrete bridge and a few miles on they came upon
a roadside gas station. They stood in the road and studied it. I think we should
check it out, the man said. Take a look. The weeds they forded fell to dust about
them. They crossed the broken asphalt apron and found the tank for the pumps. The
cap was gone and the man dropped to his elbows to smell the pipe but the odor of
gas was only a rumor, faint and stale. He stood and looked over the building. The
pumps standing with their hoses oddly still in place. The windows intact. The door
to the service bay was open and he went in. A standing metal toolbox against one
wall. He went through the drawers but there was nothing there that he could use.
Good half-inch drive sockets. A ratchet. He stood looking around the garage. A
metal barrel full of trash. He went into the office. Dust and ash everywhere. The boy
stood in the door. A metal desk, a cashregister. Some old automotive manuals,
