Logan Briand Blog Post on Characters

 In the novel we notice two main characters throughout. We are introduced in the very beginning of the book to a man and boy. They are never named but only referenced to as the man and boy. They are all each other has and they fight in order to keep each other alive. The man feels that it is a god given power for him to protect the kid at all costs and will do anything to do so. The boy is a strong kid who pushes through terrible evens to support his father even if his father doesn't know that. He does not want to remain alive if his father is not with him and the same goes for his father. While they are the main characters while traveling a road after a disaster, there are other smaller characters along the way that are included.

We learn that the wife of the man, mother of the son, has been missing and they have not seen her for a long period of time. They are not sure what has happened since they were separated as she had left when the boy was very young but it is presumed that she is dead. We see through the flashbacks of the man that she no longer understood the world around her and became very distanced from the world. She had wanted to take the boy with her but the husband had refused. She had made it clear she no longer wanted to be around anyone and decided that she should die alone.

Another small character we learn about is a person who had been struck by lightning on the road. The boy wants to help the person who had been struck by lightning but yet his father refused to do so saying that they had nothing that could be given in order to help the man survive. This gives us the idea of the pain and sadness everyone is going through in this world and how people must do everything for themselves in order to survive.  

While continuing on the road, the man and boy meet someone else. While none of the characters are referenced by a name in the book, this man is referenced as a man in a truck. The father has not spoken to anyone in years but yet this is the first man that he had talked to. When the man in the truck grabbed ahold of the boy, the father reacts fast and shoots him in the head and kills him. This shows that they will do anything that it takes for survival regardless of the consequences that may come with their actions taken.

We also learn about the people that the man and boy are running from which are people who rape, kill and various other actions. The man and boy see the actions that these bad people, the road agents, are when they witness the killings first hand which shows the way they are desensitized to things that nobody should be. While I am sure there are many other smaller characters, these stuck out to me most due to the way they impact the story overall as well as the man and boy. 

The book has started to become very interesting and I am excited to continue reading to find out what will happen next. 

Logan Briand Blog Post (Style)

 Wile reading the first half of The Road by Cormac McCarthy many things stuck out to me regarding style. The biggest thing that I notice is the fact that there are no chapters throughout the entire novel. I find this to be fairly odd as I have never read a book without chapters in it. While it has proven to be a fairly easy novel to read due to the way the book is set up in the sense of short paragraphs. This was a change that I did not think I would adjust well to but I actually prefer this type of a book. Usually, when I read a book with chapters I tend to scout how many pages are in it and most of the time decide to not read that chapter. With small paragraphs, I continue to read and feel more involved in the book and have enjoyed reading thus far which is not common for me as I am not a fan of reading books I can not choose.

Another thing that I find interesting that was a smart style characteristic used by the author is not naming the main characters. Throughout the novel they are mainly referenced as the father and son. I find this to keep me engaged more than hearing a name because I like to match the description the author gives with what I think is happening in the novel. This gives me the ability to form my own opinions on the characters without feeling one is more important than others. In addition to just the writing style itself, I enjoy that the author brings up past events relating to the time before a catastrophic event occurs. This allows me to connect the past and present which is normally my issue when reading this type of novel. 

Through the first half of the story, we notice that it is more often that the father is speaking but yet there is no dominant character. This leads me to believe the story is written in the third person point of view which allows us to see the reactions of all the characters and not just a particular one. While the book is not one that is complex to read and understand, I find that with the third person point of view as well as a writing style that can be all over the place sometimes, it is more interesting than one that just follows a timeline because that is what most novels do. While at times it can be hard to follow,  I have enjoyed reading the book this far. The page breaks make it seem as though I am not reading as much as I am and the view point makes it an interesting novel to read.

If I had one complaint for the novel to this point, I would say that I am not a fan of the way the author writes dialogue as it can be hard to follow who is speaking when there are no quotation marks around that dialogue. This book has mainly kept my interest due to the aspect of the short paragraphs, making it easy for me to go back and reread certain sections to grasp a better idea of the speaker and how it relates to the part of the story I had just been reading. In addition, although it has picked up now, I had initially felt as though the story took a while to actually get started and was particularly dry in the beginning. Other than these minor details that take away from the book, I am excited to continue reading to find out what will happen next.