The Road Sections 301-310 Quotes
The Road Sections 301-310 Quotes
How we cite the quotes:
Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote 1
He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he'd left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea's black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different. (303.1)
Almost all tender moments in The Road are between The Man and The Boy, but here's a sweet one between The Man and The Woman. It happens before the apocalypse. The two must be sleeping on the beach. The Man wakes up and looks into the night sky and watches the surf, then looks at his sleeping wife. He says to himself that he wouldn't have made the world any other way; this moment and this woman sleeping beside him are perfection. Now that's romantic!
Quote 2
They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless. (307.1)
McCarthy's repetition of the world "senseless" here is pretty amazing. We interpret this double-whammy as follows. In the first "senseless," McCarthy is talking about the ocean itself and its lack of sentient creatures – it's literally devoid of any feeling beings. But the second "senseless" is a value judgment about all this death. It's "senseless," meaning pointless. We couldn't agree more.