The Road in Color

  Well… this book isn’t exactly uplifting.  Sure, I expected the apocalypse.  I expected the death and doom.  I expected the roaming gangs of cannibals and mounds of dead bodies.  What I did not expect though was the use of the word “gray” literally once per two pages (on average) for the first forty pages.  Look at this:

               “The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing.  Gray slush by the roadside.” (McCarthy 15)

               “He sat by a gray window in the gray light…” (McCarthy 28)

               Really?  I get it already: everything is gray! 

   Or is it?  I decided to take a closer look at what exactly is gray in The Road.

               By an overwhelming margin, the natural world and light (especially that of dawn) were most frequently described as gray.  For instance, the “serpentine of a river” (McCarthy 4), “a reach of meadow-lands” (McCarthy 6), “beads of small… ice” (McCarthy 17), and a “shroud of mist” (McCarthy 38), are all gray.  Likewise, “the first… light” (McCarthy 2), “[the break of day]” (McCarthy 10), and “the… light… in the late afternoon” (McCarthy 28), are gray.  Everything about the setting, both the time and place, is gray, painting each day as “more gray… than what had gone before” (McCarthy 1).  The repetitive use of the word (unlike Cormac McCarthy, I’ll spare you from reading it again) illustrates the desolate and monotonous nature of the protagonists’ existence.

               So what about the other colors?  As one might expect from a story like this, the color black is prevalent.  It is frequently used to describe distant and foreboding objects.  For example, “the thin black trees [burn] on the slopes like stands of heathen candle” (McCarthy 50) and the gang truck’s “black diesel smoke [coils] through the woods” (McCarthy 64).  In addition, it seems to cling to everyone: the father has “black kid shoes” (McCarthy 11), the boy’s face is “streaked with black” (McCarthy 8), and the road’s “hot black mastic [sucks] at their shoes” (McCarthy 51).  Even the gang member who they encounter in the ditch is wearing a “black billcap” (McCarthy 65).  Perhaps the most vivid descriptions involving the color black are those about the darkness of night: “the blackness he woke up to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable… a blackness to hurt your ears with listening” (McCarthy 14).  I’m not sure exactly what this color means, but it is certainly not positive.  Maybe it’s something along the lines of horror or void?  Equating its meaning to horror would explain its use as a foreboding object and why it is always clinging to people in this world, but doesn’t really make sense in the context of “a blackness to hurt your ears with listening” (McCarthy 14). 

               You might think that white, being the opposite of black, means salvation or heaven or good or… anything nice?  Nope.  This is The Road: it means death.  His dead wife is described as “his pale bride” and has “combs of ivory” in her dark hair (another example of blackness clinging to people) (McCarthy 17).   Birch trees are given the color “bone pale” (McCarthy 11) and the eyes of the bizarre beast in the father’s dream are “dead white” (McCarthy 2). 

  The other colors aren’t any better.  “Yellow leaves” sounded kind of nice until I remembered the sentence before sticks those leaves directly next to “perch lolling belly up in the clear water” (McCarthy 12).  It’s also the color of the “mummied [dead’s]” teeth (McCarthy 23).  I’m associating this color with corpses and decay, while white is more the bones and spirits aspect of death.  Red is mainly connected to injury and wounds, but it’s also the color of a ham they find and consume (could be an eerie connection to cannibalism). 

               Blue seems to represent false hope.  As the father snaps out of day dream where “the sky [is] aching blue,” he reflects that he is “learning to wake himself from just such siren worlds,” associating the color blue with an allusion to sirens – who , in Greek mythology, would lure sailors into rocks and drown them (McCarthy 17).  The father also recalls seeing a falcon which “[falls] down the long blue wall of a mountain and [breaks] with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes” (McCarthy 19). The crane is taking off towards some distant goal, probably with a sense of safety and confidence, only to be obliterated by something it could not predict.  The gang member the protagonists encounter in the ditch is wearing “filthy blue overalls” and attempts to convince them that he means them no harm, only to pull a knife on the son a moment later (McCarthy 65).  Beware the blue.

               There are a couple of inferences which can be made using knowledge of these motifs.  The boy is described as “ghostly pale,” but he is still alive (McCarthy 44).  This could mean that he is weak and frail (close to death) or it could foreshadow his death.  I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially after the protagonists’ conversation on page 9 where they discuss the son’s death and the impact it would have on the father.  In contrast to his son, the father is painted as gray; his heart is as gray as “raw cold daylight” (McCarthy 27).   I think this speaks to his resilience and willingness to endure the repetitive and desolate nature of the world.  It reinforces his statement to his wife that “[they’re] survivors” – she clearly wasn’t though (McCarthy 56).  At first the monotonous use of gray appears dismal and depressing, but, in this context, it actually has one of the most positive connotations of all the colors in the story.  I’d call that a silver lining.  Lastly, their shelter with the plastic tarp is depicted as a “frail blue shape… like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world” (McCarthy 49).  The protagonists’ encampment, and by extension their attempt to remain civilized and survive, is associated with false hope… RIP.