A Funeral Procession

This post started as a comment on Jordan's blog post entitled "The Road" (http://jwpuente.blogspot.com/2011/02/road.html) before it got out of control (yikes!) so please start there. It relates to the scene where the man kills a stranger on the road, part of a larger group guiding a diesel truck.

This scene really does feel like a turning point and seems to initiate a downward trend in mood (which was painfully bleak to begin with). When the man returns to retrieve what's left of their cart he sees the other man's remains, those that had had not been cannibalized.. He is haunted by the other man's death, the death of his brother. We're all related to some extent, but now that there are fewer of us in the world, this family connection is that much closer. Even though this other was a "bad guy" as the boy would say, the loss of life is regrettable. I think the ghost of this stranger stays with the man for the rest of the book, and is partly responsible for his darkening mood and the book's decaying tone.

I think all the world's ghosts are following them on this journey. The trip is like one long funeral procession, and they are gathering more and more lost souls along the way. They are heading towards the ocean in an attempt to find a warmer clime, and, I believe, in hopes of attained a kind of baptismal cleansing. And they carry these ghosts with them all the way. At one point, the man makes a flute for the boy. In the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a flute is used to enthrall rats and lead them into a river to drown. In the Bible, Jesus casts a group of demons known as Legion into a herd of pigs that drown themselves in the Sea of Galilee. Both of these last events represent cleansing in their own way, though they cleanse disease and evil, respectively, rather than sin.  Either way, I think this journey represents a pilgrimage of burial. Burial of the old world. Burial of the human race.

There are lots of ways for an apocalypse to happen, but really only one way for an apocalypse to end. It ends when the survivors learn to let go. Let go of what was lost, let go of the dead, let go of the gone world. This story is about letting go. But sometimes that is a long, dark voyage.


So how the heck did I get here from my original topic? Oh well. There's something else I want to write about, something that I felt was the main "point" of the novel for me, but I'll get to that later when we reach the end of this book and I've gotten my thoughts together. I'll just leave it with this: I think the man is being punished. Thanks for reading.