Try to imagine a world after Judgment Day. It is the end of human civilization. A conflagration had engulfed the entire world and burned everything to ashes. What will you do then with limited resources running out every passing day, the number of survivors dwindling dramatically, and no one to turn to for help?

The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy, is such a post-apocalyptic book that centers on the survival game of the remaining mankind in an almost hopeless world. The two main characters, a father and a son, are on their way from the south of America to the north, hoping to make it through a piercing cold winter while the father’s health worsens over time. Throughout their journey, the readers will witness with them how cannibals barbecue their own newborn babies for food; the weak and sick taken captive and locked up inside a cellar as food storage in case the cannibals feel hungry; humans turning into savages raping women and children… This book reveals that animal nature, in the end, is the intense will to survive at all costs. But what differentiates humans from other animals is humans’ capability of love and kindness that can eventually win against any evil that is meant to destroy a being. So you may ask at this point, what eventually happens to the father and son, and were they able to reach their destination and find hope again? Well, that is for you to find out.

In spite of the seemingly interesting topic and the thought-provoking central theme of this book, however, the author failed to create a good story out of it. All the events are loosely connected together with the danger of falling apart at any moment. Furthermore, the author uses his words randomly and prodigally, tossing in sudden inspiration that flashes upon his mind but have no relationship with the plot, and tries to make the simplest things sound profound. Many sentences serve not a purpose in this book, and it is simply a compilation of unnecessary descriptions that fails to engage the readers; instead, they bore the readers with the author’s plain and monotonous language:

"He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap and held it out and the boy came and took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and rummaged through the pack. The ate a can of white beans, passing it between them, and he threw the empty tin into the woods.
Then they set out down the road again" (McCarthy 59).

Even the occasional “big words” that the author uses seem as if they are forced into the writing, creating incoherency in the fluency of the book. The jargons of references to Christendom in the book sounds pretentious and hypocritical. “Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity,” Stephen King once said. With such a simple plot of the story, it sounds discordant for the author to lift his writing up to a religious level: the father and son meet with difficulties, they fight to overcome these difficulties, and they go south. And why are they so intent on going south? Why has there been an apocalyptic event on earth? What will they do after they reach their destination? The author explains none in detail. The whole book is a poorly-constructed story. Logic doesn’t play a big part in this book. Logos, or the rationale of order in the universe, is nowhere to be seen in the midst of chaos and disorder under the writing of McCarthy.

Ultimately, the book is inconsistent and unorganized. One can see the author behind his every written word, and the book fails at giving characters personality and making it something beyond himself even with the intrinsically appealing genre of post-apocalyptic scientific fiction.