Is it The Real World? Or Is It The Eyes Of memory?

I have only read up to page 150, but only from that portion of the book, I can clearly see all the main memories that affect why the father does certain things. His memories are much like the ones we see in a superhero comic book, or tv show. The Flashback into the past, and they remember every detail, which than affects whatever they do next,plus the people surrounding them. This is what happens to the father in "The Road", and he may not realise it, but it also affects his son.


His memories are sparked by familiar objects, or by a dream. The first one we encounter is with a phone, an object which was used in the world he use to know, "Then he picked up the phone and dialed the number of his father's house in that long ago." It was almost natural for him to want to call his father, it was a memory which was vivid, and being replayed physically. Both in his mind and in his body, he was back in time, calling his father, until his son brought him back to reality, "what are you doing?"

We find him remembering the things he had, his past, "He pushed open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things" he is still living in the past, even though he is needed at present. Different objects spark different memories, "Some money, credit cards. His driver's license. A picture of his wife." He holds on to them like a treasure of gold, because they are objects that hold what he once knew.

Although a lot of his memories deal with a distant past, it also deals with a more recent past. The one about his long gone wife, "In his dreams his pale bride came to him out of a green and leafy canopy. Her nipples pipecalyed and her rib bones painted white. She wore a dress of gauze and her dark hair was carried up in combs of ivory, combs of shell". It is only in memories that the writer, Cormac McCarthy, truly allows himself to be descriptive. He drops all the senses, the colors, the thoughts on the Father, and its where we can truly compare the world of before to the world he is in now. The memory of his wife, is one of the most important and repeated memories, "What is it? she said. What is happening? I don’t know." He even holds on to her every word. It’s her memory which kills him, but also keeps him alive since his son is part of her, "He coughed till he could taste the blood and said her name aloud." He disagrees with what his last moments of her tell him about life " Death is not a lover. Oh yes it is. Please don't do this." and its might be what keeps him alive. The promise to never do what she did, even though he keeps this promise to himself, he sometimes falls into her arguments and starts to believe her, "you will not face the truth. You will not."

The past is always with the father, but he is also forgetting it, "The color of it moved something in him long forgotten. Make a list. Recite a litany. Remember." This show that the life he knew is getting farther and farther away, and perhaps less important. He even begins to realize that the world, which is now gone, is also being destroyed in his mind, "The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already?"