The Road Sections 261-270 Quotes
The Road Sections 261-270 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote 1
Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men. The boy's age. A little older. Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number. Collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers. (261.1)
This is a scene The Man witnessed in his childhood. We wonder if the evils perpetrated in McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world continue to occur simply because no one knows how to deal with them. Consider this sentence: "The men poured gasoline on them [the snakes] and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be." Pretty heavy stuff.
Perhaps no one imagined the evil people could do to each other, and thus had no remedy against it? What happens when evil changes shape? How do you deal with a new evil? And what if we only know the various shapes of evil – and can destroy them – but can never destroy evil itself? McCarthy thinks you'd end up in a world similar to the one in The Road.
One night the boy woke from a dream and would not tell him what it was.
You dont have to tell me, the man said. It's all right.
[The Boy:] I'm scared.
[The Man:] It's all right.
[The Boy:] No it's not.
[The Man:] It's just a dream.
[The Boy:] I'm really scared.
[The Man:] I know.
The boy turned away. The man held him. Listen to me, he said.
[The Boy:] What.
[The Man:] When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up. Do you understand? And you cant give up. I wont let you. (262.1-262.11)
Sometimes we wonder about The Man. Why does he persist if the only outcome – for him and The Boy – is misery? Is there some drive that keeps him and The Boy alive beyond happiness, and that keeps a lot of the folks on the road going? Certainly, his love for The Boy figures strongly in The Man's decision. But it could also be argued that it would be best expressed by a merciful double-suicide. Maybe The Woman had it right. It's a measure of how terrible things get in the novel when suicide seems like the good option.