ShmoopTube

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We speak student!

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[ scream ]

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The Road

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The Setting

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a la Shmoop

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[ bird caws ]

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What can we learn about the first 20 pages?

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What can't we learn?

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One of the crazy things about The Road is that -

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spoiler alert - we never find out

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what happened.

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All we learn in the first 20 pages

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is the nothingness that is to come from the rest of the book.

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It really sets the tone. And The Road

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does a good job of showing us how

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in a lot of literature, you can,

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within the first page, 20 pages,

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figure out exactly how the rest of the book is gonna read.

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And that's exactly what happens. It's very sparse.

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It's very bleak. We get to know

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these two characters, and in the first 20 pages,

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the man and the boy don't have names.

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If they don't have names in the first 20 pages,

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they're probably not gonna have names.

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So we kind of get to know this world of this

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anonymous man and boy who are literally just wandering

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down a road.

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So it's almost the omission of things is a theme here.

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That we don't know what happened. It's almost like saying

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it doesn't matter. Something bad is coming.

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People don't have names, kind of reminds me of Invisible Man.

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One of the main characters didn't have a name.

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- That was a big deal. - Yep.

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And so this is like everyman, or this is sort of

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- a lyrical phrase. - Yeah.

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Yeah, in terms of not knowing

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what happened, it just almost makes it scarier, because

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if we know,

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okay, it was a nuclear war,

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then in our heads, we can be like,

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- "Oh..." - "We'll ban nuclear weapons someday."

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Exactly. "We can figure that out.

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We fixed the hole in the ozone layer, we can ban nuclear weapons."

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But when we don't know what happened, we can't

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- prevent it from happening. - Was it ebola?

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- Was it a virus, or...? - Right. Exactly.

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And we have no idea.

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The only things that we get at the beginning of the book

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are kind of some flashbacks to

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there was a bright light and some sounds.

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- But that could be literally anything. - Yeah, we don't really know.

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It could be war. It could nuclear --

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And the title itself, The Road...

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The road ahead, the road's empty.

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You don't know where you're going.

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- So it's like you're filling in blanks. - Exactly. Exactly. Yep.

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[ pen writing ]

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What tone is delivered by the introduction?

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What do we know about The Road?

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Why don't the main characters have names?

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How does not knowing the characters' names affect the tone?

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[ laughs ] Who wrote this?

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