Road+2010+Civilization

​ __Civilization and the Physical Wasteland__



"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

“He started down the rough wooden steps...On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt. The smell was hideous.”

“With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless.”



"He woke before dawn and watched the gray day break. Slow and half opaque. He rose while the boy slept and pulled on his shoes and wrapped in his blanket he walked out through the trees. He descended into a gryke in the stone and there he crouched coughing and he coughed for a long time. Then he just knelt in the ashes. He raised his face to the paling day. Are you there? he whispered. Will I see you at the last? Have you a neck by which to throttle you? Have you a heart? Damn you eternally have you a soul? Oh God, he whispered. Oh God."



"He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone. ​ ==== "http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/1874000/The_Road" ====  __Animoto__

"http://static.animoto.com/swf/w.swf?w=swf/vp1&e=1271023383&f=sePaE18eFXklNsswmQ99dg&d=33&m=b&r=w&i=m&options="

__Analysis__ The theme "wasteland" can be represented in the novel in both a symbolic and physical way. The world the boy and the man are living in is physically trashy; they live in a world of dead things. With nothing to eat and meager supplies for survival they take each day as a blessing. With no one to depend on but each other they have to rely on the other ones company to keep each other morally sound. In a world where all morals are lost due to the need to survive, the man tries to teach the boy how to keep his standards intact. They struggle throughout the novel between what is right and wrong or how far over the line they are willing to go to survive. The high morals of the man and the innocence of the boy combine to make them always chose doing whats right over doing what they need to do to survive. Although, does whats "right" change when you are living in a waste land? Are the bad guys actually bad, or are they merely surviving? The man and the boy keep the old world morals throughout the whole novel no matter how close they are to death. Where on the other hand the bad guys resort to doing any thing they can to just survive. The boy and the man do there best to stay civilized in when all the worlds a wasteland.

We chose to do an animoto because the combination of pictures music and text makes a powerful statement that corresponds with how powerful the book is. We chose to use these quotes because we felt like they gave a good depiction of the civilization and of what the physical wasteland was like in the novel. They allowed you to visualize what the landscape that the boy and the man were dealing with while they tried to survive in the rugged and barren terrain.

 __Discussion Questions__ By: Alex, Michelle, Patrick, and Sean
 * 1) Do you think that something could happen to make our civilization similar to that in The Road? Do you think you could survive in a world like this? Why or why not?
 * 2) How do you think the conditions of the physical wasteland has effected the man and the boy? Would you be able to stick to your beliefs through something as destructive as what has happened in The Road?
 * 3) What do you think is the status of the human population in The Road? Are there more people alive than the man thinks there is? Why or why not?