How effective is visibility in The Road by McCarthy ?
Frist of all, I will talk about the visibility of the landscape in The Road. The reader is never told exactly where the story takes place though it is implied that it is set after the end of the world, and the only thing we are given to imgine of the landscape is nothingness. Indeed, from the beginning of the novel, the reader faces colorlesss and montionless surroundings. The man looks for “anything of color, any movement” (4) but there are only “ash and dust everywhere” (7). The whole environnement is actually covered in ash, as though it was a filter on everything that prevents the reader to imagine. Adding to this, the descriptions in themselves are quite plain, not very precise nor
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Calvino refers to the visions and dreams of Dante's character contrary to his own visions which he used to write: “for Dante the poet as well, the entire journey of Dante the actor is of the same nature as these visions”. In The Road, the narrator is focalised on the man which establishes a tacit link between the character and the writer. The fact that the reader is given the man's thoughts and especially his dreams and flashbacks, makes us wonder if they are his or the writer's. Indeed, the images the dreams and flashbacks of the man create seem to be more visible to the reader, they have colors and a special taste that makes them different from the world the characters evolve in. However, those images do only exist in the man's imagination. This adds a other layer of imagination for the reader. Just like when we dream that we are dreaming, McCarthy makes us imagine the imagination of his character. Even more susprisingly, those images seem even more visible than the actual lanscape. As a consequesnce, if we come back to Calvino's vision of the process of imagination during the act of writing, one could wonder if the images of the book that seem to be the more visible (even though the less anchored in reality) are the one which actually inspired McCarthy's