McCarthy Unabridged: The Road, Page 27

The passage I wrote below is what I imagined was cut from Cormac McCarthy's The Road while he was writing the book.

He knew he shouldnt have come. Entering the house meant all the memories rushingback to him, but he couldnt help it. Seeing something that once represented his haven in a cold, godless world led to feelings he was not able to describe. He thought that visiting his house would not have a big impact on him. He just wanted to be able to revisit his childhood, his past. The mistake he made was not realizing how dangerous memories can be and how change can affect someone. He didnt know until he was able to see that it was just not the same anymore. Dreams in the world did not represent a child’s imaginings or nightmares. Dreams now meant one or the other: the present or the future. Bad dreams made him fear the world he lives in, but it still reassured him that he was alive. Good dreams let him knew he was giving up. That the end was coming for him.

When it was too late, he noticed that only the house that stood was the present. All of the memories, the events, the happiness were left in the past. His whole life was gone before his eyes. Nothing left. What is there to live for he thought. What is left in this world. Is there hope?  He wondered if this is how weak he has already gotten to think about death so easily. Everything so gray. The world so empty.

Here is my rationale to explain the decisions I made for my project.

For my section, I placed it on page 27, after the first paragraph. I wanted to be able to touch more upon the idea of good and bad dreams and giving up, so I thought it would be most beneficial to place it where I did because the paragraph focused on his memories and dreams. My scene adds more to the man’s character development because the readers are able to see how dangerous memories can be. Just by the man remembering his childhood and recalling his joyful moments, it makes it harder for him to move on and shatters his firm belief of trying to survive in a world where everything is gone. In order to foreshadow how sever his illness is, I made him think about giving up and death since that shows the readers that he is having a hard time trying to keep moving on. Foreshadowing this in his house seemed like an interesting choice since his house only represented what is now “dead”. While the house itself was still present, all of the memories and moments shared in his home were dead along with everyone else he cared about.

The theme I chose is dangers of memory. Good memories from the past seem to be one of the biggest obstacles because they remind the man of what he used to have and what he doesn’t have anymore. This theme is significant in my scene because everything is revolved around the idea of how memories can interfere with trying to keep going. My motif is dreams because I think dreams and memories have a very close relationship with each other. Both have always been a recurring theme since memories hinder the man’s motivation to keep going and dreams only made him fear the outcomes: being alive in a dead world or the end coming for him. The essential question I asked was: What is there to live for? What is the point of continuing to survive? Because there is nothing left, both characters have thought about this question at least once in the novel. Even the readers cannot help but ask this question since there seems to be no hope of living in a better environment in the near future. Even in the novel, there are numerous obstacles that tell them dying is easier than surviving. As for a McCarthy-esque vocabulary, I used “rushingback”. I put these two words together because I wanted to create the illusion of all the memories literally coming back to the man at once.