What I thought about 'The Road' (project 1)

     When I first started reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy, I had found it rather slow paced and dull. The reason I found it uninteresting is probably because my judgement of the book before I had started to read it. When I was picking this book, I had a choice between five books. To hopefully get a book that I would like, I read the backs of the books like most people. The Road said something about a boy and a father trying to survive in a post apocalyptic world. After reading this summary, I had imagined that the book would be action packed and full of suspense. It took me about fifty pages to realize that wasn't going to happen. Those fifty and the next fifty pages were the longest pages that I had ever read. After that, I started to really pay attention to the philosophical point a lot more and became extremely interested in that.
     I feel that McCarthy has done an excellent job in describing human behavior when the only thing that you worry about is survival and all hope is gone. Constantly struggling for life and death changes people in a bad way. What makes humans different from other animals is that comparatively, we live very comfortable lives. Many people have nothing to worry about regarding food and water, and we don't have any natural predators that we need to defend ourselves against. When that security is taken away however, we go back to our primal instincts. As can be seen in the book, no group of people cared or trusted any other group and most groups of people resorted to cannibalism just to continue living.
     I also thought that the style of writing that McCarthy used was interesting. There were no names  mentioned about any of the people (except Ely but that wasn't his real name), a great portion of the book was dialogue between characters and no quotation marks were used, and the language used was very formal even between the father and the son. I think that there was one informal word used  throughout the entire book. It was "yeah" said by the father instead of "yes" I think when the son asked if they could leave some place. This was confusing some times but over all I think that it added to the quality of the book.
     I mentioned that the dialogue was unusual, but I didn't expand on that fully. Large portions of those dialogues were simple sentences or just one word answers such as "okay" or "yes". I think that this lack of commonly accepted grammar and the use of simple sentences further show the reader how dehumanized people are becoming.
     Over all, I am very happy that I chose this book to read but think that I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't rushed to conclusions when picking it, and if I had read it slower because I feel that there are some parts of the book that I missed the first time around.