TASK 1- Expectations from quotations

The ’type’ and ‘genre’ of this novel is a horror set in a post-apocalyptic world and identified as a low cultured film, inspired by the cold war, with the threat of nuclear Armageddon. ‘This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job’, this quote helps us to identify the basic storyline and theme of this novel, potentially having death arise on more than one occasion. The world they live in is potentially unsafe, ‘Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth’¸ and these two characters were the last two left, ‘She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift.’ The characterisation of a father and his son, have experienced the theme of death, and are now travelling on a journey down what seems to be a never ending road, to flee from the threat of something dangerous, ‘Are we still the good guys, he said.’ ‘They sat on the edge of the tub and pulled their shoes on and then he handed the boy the pan and soap and he took the stove and the little bottle of gas and the pistol and wrapped in their blankets and they went back across the yard to the bunker’, this quote identifies the characters to be acting as equals to one another, as opposed to father in charge of the sun, and ‘Okay? Okay,’ expresses the exhaustion and theme of a never ending struggle for pilgrimage that the characters have no need for pleasantries. Cormac McCarthy uses almost simplistic content, grammar and punctuation, however enhances the story with extravagant words such as ‘glaucoma’, to make you want to carry on reading.