Saturday, June 1, 2013

The Road vs. Others


Group assignment #1: Compare The Road  to other post-apocalyptic books/movies

I am nowhere near as educated about this topic as some of my group members are. I’ve seen 2012, the Day After Tomorrow, I am Legend, the Book of Eli, etc and I read a series that would fit into that group when I was younger. But those are basically what I’m comparing the Road to.
The Road is different from all of those movies because of how it’s timed. At the beginning of the book, the reader isn’t dropped into mass chaos. There is no major crisis that the characters are dealing with. The world has already ended and now the only issue is survival. Despite it being a transient world, this book had a feeling of calm. Everything seemed to have its place. This is a weird concept, but that’s what it felt like. The dead people had been dead for a while, the cannibals had a system worked out and the boy and his dad knew what they were doing. They had settled into this routine from years of walking on the road.
Also this book is different because the reader doesn’t know what caused this grey state. There was no accident, natural disaster, zombie attack, massive nuclear/chemical warfare, or anything like that, unlike most other post-apocalyptic books/movies.
It’s never specifically stated why the Earth is so desolate and hopeless. That was different for me. I kept thinking that the dad would have a flashback, to the day that everything went crazy. I was waiting and waiting for that to happen…it never did. For all I know the Earth could have just died, getting more and more barren to the point where there weren’t enough resources to sustain everyone. Whatever the case, that aspect of the book is completely left up to the reader’s imagination. 

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