"As another mystical image, the mystery can refer to the possibility of transformation the man believes is inherent in the child, and thus for hope in the future. But it can also represent primordial forces, like an apocalyptic event, that elude man’s knowledge and are beyond his control." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"The centrality of natural forces in McCarthy's vision of the world is expressed in the novel's assertion that the maps and mazes on the trout's backs, cartographic puzzles through which life's mystery is both delineated and obscured, are visual schemata of natural processes which are beyond the power of humanity to restore to the world once they are lost." (Dowd 32).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[...] fleeting image of the past, before the religion of capitalism takes hold. [...] the past tense of the paragraph indicates that a human hand does eventually take the trout for its own possession, giving it over to the realm of property, closing off the common use and the cognizance of that mystery and wonder of the “world in its becoming.” (Dominy 156).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"This achingly mournful passage alone would justify the novel's exaggerated representation of environmental collapse, as it closes the narrative with a poetic vision of vitality which is made all the more affecting through its analeptic framing within a desolated world. […] The destitution of the novel's present-day world heightens the affective power of this simple image of an organism swimming in fresh water […]." (Dowd 32).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"While the boy seems to have found safety and a new family, some critics have suggested that this apparently hopeful ending may be deceptive. [...] There would, perhaps, be greater grounds for an optimistic reading if the novel’s ending remained focused on the boy, but it does not. [...] The ending yearns for the beginning but rules out any hope of a new one. The final sentence downgrades the importance of the human world and shows us a universe in which we are not the centre, and in which our passing may not after all be the ultimate tragedy." (Pudney 308).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[…] the world represented by the father, the world of late industrial, patriarchal, capitalist individualism, cannot survive much longer without a change in our ethical comportment, a change that privileges community over goods and the relief of suffering over future-oriented calculations. It’s a simple, even childlike, moral prescription, yet one that McCarthy’s novel suggests might be the only hope for we humans at the end of the world." (Elmore 145-146).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"Instead of providing a rational, practical answer [...], the reader is asked to accept on faith that the boy will survive, because he deserves to. In other words, the reader is asked to make the same leap of faith as the boy’s father has, despite the crushing weight of the evidence of all that has happened so far." (Pudney 305).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[...] the father was right about goodness: it arrives on cue as a deus ex machina that has been following the pair and swiftly enfolds the boy savior into a holy family, maybe a holy commune, where they talk of the breath of God passing “from man to man through all of time.” (Brooks).

www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/review/review-the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy.html

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"These questions and the boy’s anxiety about the fate of the other boy are, of course, as much anxious questions about his own fate." (Elmore 139).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"Beginning with the father’s dark dream of “a cave where the child led him by the hand”, the novel ends by closing the circle, as the dying father believes he is there once again [...]. He himself may never find the light but he does with the knowledge that his son carries it onward, still on the road [...]." (Mitchell 227).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"[...] in the father’s final attempt to bequeath his son the principles and wisdom that have led them throughout the novel, we discover that these rules are empty, ideological hopes rather than practical methods of success. Implicit in this concession is the notion not only that the father’s rules cannot assure his son’s survival, but that it is precisely doing the opposite of these rules, a willingness to take chances, to retrace one’s steps, and to leave one’s gun that open possibilities of future success." (Elmore 141).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Ending here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/ending/

"In the father we see, following Stark, a prototypical Western subject: masculine, American, white, Christian, middle-class, heteronormative, able-bodied, and well-educated. He is the very picture of rugged American individualism with his stereotypically masculine proclivity for tools and guns, his knowledge of woodcraft and survivalism, his no tears attitude, and his dogged persistence [...]." (Elmore 137).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The father even falls back on the heroic stoicism that we find in some of McCarthy 's other Southern characters, as he implores his son to keep trying [...]." (Walsh 53).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909381

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"McCarthy’s prose is for the most part functional and spare, describing actions rather than elaborating on inner states and feelings. The love that exists between the father and his son is beautifully depicted, but this is achieved without any hyperbole: the man’s frequent observation about his son’s thinness is quietly effective in communicating his love and his fears for the boy." (Pudney 300).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The lack of any personal names often leaves the reader in some doubt as to whom the pronoun “he” refers to. All this reflects the descent into a world in which the only imperative is survival." (Pudney 300).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

"[...] The Road often relies on pronouns for character identification. Short by nature, pronouns allow McCarthy to emphasize the characters’ deeds by drawing away as little attention as possible from action verbs [...]." (Kunsa 61).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jml.2009.33.1.57

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The novel repeatedly transposes descriptive terms and metaphors from physiology to the environment." (Dowd 33).

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The novel seems to suggest a correspondence between the functioning of a biological organism and the global ecosystems whose collapse is so apparent." (Dowd 35).

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

"Obvious signs of indebtedness occur in the scene of footprints on hot macadam, recalling Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the heart-stopping glimpse of Friday’s footsteps on sand." (Mitchell 216).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Cormac McCarthy was famously skeptical about punctuation. Throughout his career, he refrained from using citation marks, and in the interview, he (to the surprise of many) gave to Oprah Winfrey when she selected The Road for her book club, he said: “There’s no reason to blot up the page with weird little marks. If you write properly you shouldn’t have to punctuate. [. . .] I believe in periods, capitals, and the occasional comma. And that’s it.” (Andersen 4).

https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2024.2420889

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The pervasiveness of consumption in The Road is evident even in the word choices of its characters and narrator. If the novel portends an end of capitalism, its setting presents an environment that is merely what is left after absolutely every resource has been harvested or appropriated, leaving only refuse, junk, and litter. The destiny of the consumed thing is to become waste, a word that appears several times in The Road, always as descriptions of the ashen dead landscape. [...] the world is both vast and empty and also the waste of itself, spent, used up, the leftovers from the passing away of the consumer society and the society of vagabonds and bloodcults wrenching nearly every last resource from the land and finally killing and eating each other."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on "Worlbuilding" here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/?p=194

"And the very topos of the world as wasteland extends from Eliot and Fitzgerald forward, though [...] It is Hemingway, however, whose adoption of the topos most prominently engages McCarthy, in his self-conscious revision of the Nick Adams stories with their focus on the relationship of father and son [...]." (Mitchell 217).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Inevitably, language too will disappear if there are not enough speakers to maintain its many dialects and conventions. The dialogs between the man and the boy indicate that the loss of language is already well underway; their conversations are often simply reserved to matters of survival or the present situation and rarely involve abstract concepts or everyday elements of the old world." (Lodoen 88).

https://shorturl.at/Fd3vS

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"[...] Cormac McCarthy is known and admired for his careful research and close attention to the details of physical settings in his novels. [...] However, reviews by a number of apparently geographically challenged critics and commentators have suggested some novel [...] interpretations for the route." (Morgan 39).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909380

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The Road has no traditional chapters, but consists of a long series of short, discrete paragraphs – 390, to be exact – that in the US first edition are separated by two lines of blank space. On the one hand, this accumulation of textual fragments emulates the broken landscape; on the other hand, the relentless progression of paragraphs mirrors the main characters’ eventful journey along the road." (Andersen 1).

https://doi.org/10.1080/0895769X.2024.2420889

"The solitary paragraphs of the novel, moreover, isolated by borders of white space, compel the abeyances, reversals, and shifts in direction that reinforce this general discontinuity—indeed, that make reading the novel similar to reading a poem, asking the reader to pause and reflect, to slow the tempo, to contemplate silences in the text as moments when language itself prepares to continue." (Mitchell 210).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Parataxis, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , is "the placing of propositions or clauses one after another, without indicating by connecting words the relation (of coordination or subordination) between them." Such a narrow literal definition is often broadened to encompass a more inclusive paratactic style, in which polysyndeton, the use of many coordinating conjunctions to connect clauses, also operates in a paratacticway. Examples of this rhetorical figure can be found throughoutMcCarthy's corpus." (Dowd 24).

"The parataxis both reflects the texture of the disjunctive and depleted post-apocalyptic world and diminishes conceptual categories with which the human mind customarily shapes its encounter with reality." (Dowd 29).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The motive of blindness has often been dear to McCarthy who used the device several times in the past [...]." (Juge 23).

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The father's oblivion has not reached the medical stage of blindness, but many around him have: his wife, for example, is blind by the time she nears her death; the man struck by lightning is also half blind [...]; and both are described as being bound to die. Blindness in The Road ,whether it is physical or spiritual, acts as a harbinger of death [...]." (Juge 23).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the paragraph more generally echoes classics from Beowulf to The Faerie Queene, introducing a nightmarish monster as emblem for monstrous times." (Mitchell 216).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"Dreams play an important role in McCarthy's narratives; most of his stories are marked by the weirdness of reminiscence and the deceitful power of dream and dreamlike narratives." (Juge 21).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

"Flashbacks, memories, dreams: all regularly disrupt the narrative flow in a fashion that nonetheless makes the narrative come alive, forcing us to concentrate on sounds and images that reflect the man’s mood of puzzlement, anxiety, disjointedness. But they also help defy the abysmal present, offering a rearguard defense of a vivid, humanizing past that everywhere else—in the landscape, in encounters with cannibals and psychopaths— is being obliterated." (Mitchell 212).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The three similes of this first paragraph (“Like the onset of some cold glaucoma . . . Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up . . . sightless as the eggs of spiders”) are themselves weirdly disorienting, much as in a dream, establishing the dissociative aura experienced by father and child confronted by a nightmarish world." (Mitchell 211).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"The darkness of the world is emphasized from the start: the first two sentences of the novel use the words “dark” or “darkness” three times, and the word “cold” appears twice in the first three sentences." (Pudney 295).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"[...] the repeated “w” (“When he woke in the woods,” “wakened,” “wandered,” “wet,” “swallowed,” “inward,” “swung,” “water,” “bowels,” and so on) has itself an odd sonic effect, enhanced by the very slippage of “w” from consonance to assonance (as a labiolized velar consonant, it can be vowel as well). It is almost as if the dream signaled a release from pedestrian prose, from the simple diction of a paratactic style to a richer, more evocative and elaborate, even distinctly human (because embellished and man-made) realm." (Mitchell 211).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Style here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/style/

"In total, six pages are devoted to the boy’s grief, which stands in stark contrast to his quick acceptance of his mother’s death. The treatment of the parents’ deaths and the boy’s reaction to these sets up a dichotomy, with mother/death on one side and father/life on the other." (Åström 122).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] most of dreams or memories refer to the past as it once was, a past the father is struggling to let go.[...] The persistent rivalry between dreams and reality is one of the father's most difficult and tempting conflicts." (Juge 22).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] as the man is dying, he calls the child “the best guy”, a superlative that elevates the boy above simple “good guy” status and sets him apart from his father and any other decent human beings." (Kunsa 65).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jml.2009.33.1.57

"When he tells the boy that he is the one carrying the fire, that he is "the best guy", he is indicating that the child has a crucial ability that he has lost. Only a good guy who has the ability to make connections with other people, to enter or help form a community, truly carries the fire. The child has this ability. This is why the child is the one who is really carrying the fire - and always has carried it. The man carries the fire only in a secondary sense: he carries the child." (Wielenberg 11).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The man’s realization that he need not kill his son resembles the story of Abraham and Isaac, in which God commands Abraham to kill his son, only to reprieve him at the last minute." (Pudney 304).

https://shorturl.at/RrmMS

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Here we return to the fundamentally masculine and individualist orientation of the father’s worldview, the chance of survival requiring a cold, self-interested, and absolute calculation of cost and benefit. Yet McCarthy’s doubling down on this masculine ethos of cost benefit is hardly an endorsement, since the father undermines the truth of his logic through the link he draws between survival and luck." (Elmore 140).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Sight and blindness in the Bible are often associated with the power of God and therefore the power of faith upon mankind: men are cured from blindness thanks to the power of God and the power of faith. I would not say that McCarthy is setting the father's upcoming blindness as an example of moral disorder or sin per se, but I do think it connects with the loss of faith and the loss of will to see the truth since in The Road most of those who have lost sight and hope end up dead". (Juge 23).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The encounter with the thief reveals the complete inhumanity of the father’s abandonment of community. [...] the mere reclamation of their lost goods quickly ceases to be the father’s principle aim; rather, he seeks revenge, taking everything the man has, despite its utter lack of value to them [...]." (Elmore 144).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The relationship of father and son embodies a tension between pragmatic self-preservation and innocent morality, keeping alive for both a fear of what they may be becoming. The father’s shrewd sense of risk is repeatedly provoked by events on the road that prompt his son’s compassionate willingness to risk. Yet gradually, each schools the other, with filial compassion balanced by paternal anxiety until finally the boy protests killing a thief who has stolen their gear [...]." (Mitchell 221).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"God is on the periphery of their hopes, present but not tangible enough to invest in." (Hibbs).

https://wm.wts.edu/read/a-reflection-on-mccarthys-the-road

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Disappearing with traditions and customs like table manners is language [...]. Losing its referents, language itself comes to its extinction, but the father saves it by teaching his son to read." (Guo 5).

https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2732

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the welcome prospect of a vital past leeching into the present comes to seem akin to the likelihood of people elsewhere, here in the present, acting like them. The boy first broaches this possibility in wondering whether “on the other side” of the ocean a father and son are doing the same as they are, recalled by the father later that night as he sits on the beach and contemplates others carrying “the fire"." (Mitchell 224).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In the world of The Road , there is a simple rule for distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. Bad guys eat people; good guys don't. This is what remains of the Categorical Imperative: don't treat people as mere food. While this is the most obvious principle to which good guys are committed, it is not the only one. It is possible to discern in The Road a Code of the Good Guys, a set of principles to which good guys are committed. That Code includes the following rules:

1. Don't eat people.
2. Don't steal.
3. Don't lie.
4. Keep your promises.
5. Help others.
6. Never give up.

The man tries to teach these principles to the child and he tries to follow them himself. Throughout the novel we witness the man's struggle to be a good guy, to do what is right in a world in which most people seem to have abandoned morality altogether." (Wielenberg 5-6).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

"Every social institution and convention that could serve as a hallmark of civilization has passed so far into oblivion that, as Ashley Kunsa argues, the names of places, road, and people have passed into meaninglessness, leaving only the deeds of individuals to providing meaning and morality to the world (61–63). The most important dividing line for the boy is the assurance from his father that they will not eat people." (Dominy 146).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The child wants to help the other boy, but the man is reluctant. The man insists that they have to leave the town now that they have attracted attention to themselves. Initially the man denies that the child really saw another boy. Then he insists that there were adults around to take care of the other boy; they were just hiding. He tries to rationalize his actions. Good guys help others - they certainly don't abandon helpless children. The man wants to be a good guy; therefore, he cannot admit that he is abandoning another child." (Wielenberg 7).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"This is the only place in the book, before the man’s death, where the reader experiences things from the boy’s point of view for more than the odd sentence, and there are two ways to interpret what has happened. The first is that the boy is imagining things. This is certainly what his father thinks [...]. Certainly the boy’s intense loneliness makes this explanation plausible. But another possibility is that the boy’s goodness has attracted another “good guy”, as it will do again at the end of the novel." (Pudney 304).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In its representation of participatory, heroic fatherhood, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road constructs the mother as lacking care, love, warmth, nurturing and survival skills. She contributes nothing to the family or the story, beyond giving birth to the child and acting as a foil for the father, who provides for the boy’s physical and emotional needs. In so doing, the narrative represents this mother specifically and motherhood more generally as irrelevant. The novel participates in a continuing cultural trend of marginalizing mothers in order to privilege fathers. This is an aspect of the novel that requires much greater discussion and analysis than scholars have so far acknowledged or provided." (Åström 125).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Throughout the narrative, the mother’s apparent lack of awareness of, and readiness for, dealing with disaster is juxtaposed with the man’s preparedness; her emotional weakness contrasts with his dogged determination. Where the man refuses to give in, the woman does not even see herself as in charge of her own existence [...]. Even when it comes to committing suicide, it seems that the man is better prepared than the woman." (Åström 121).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In The Road, the father is pitted against, and trumps, the mother in three areas. In so doing, he shows that as a post-feminist father, he is a much better carer and guardian for the child than she is. First, he is emotionally involved with the boy and prepared to sacrifice himself for his survival, whereas the mother is emotionally distant and seems exclusively concerned with her own existence. Second, he is resourceful and quick-thinking. The mother, on the other hand, takes no independent action and appears to have no practical or survival skills. Third, the father is essential to the boy, even after his own death. The mother, in contrast, is quickly forgotten. Where the mother is constructed as expendable in every way, the father is presented as irreplaceable." (Åström 118-119).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The mother character is neither a traditional mother nor a ‘new’ mother. She is a non-entity with no relevance to the lives of her husband and son. By simultaneously reinforcing traditional stereotypes and embracing a ‘new’ fatherhood that is predicated on the elision of mothers, McCarthy and his critics present a futuristic world in which the only parent who is needed is the father." (Åström 114).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] dreams may affect perception but they are also a clear indicator of life since it indicates persistent perception. Once death is upon men dreams indeed cease, which is the case of the wife [...]." (Juge 22).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] misery necessitates faith. In the case of the man, his love for his son motivates him to keep going. His problem is that his desire to keep going appears to lack a rational foundation. [...] Nevertheless, the man keeps on going despite recognizing, at some level, that the struggle may very well be futile. Because it is in the nature of human beings to desire that the things they do make sense, he grasps for beliefs that will make his struggle make sense. Among these is the belief that he is on a divine mission. It is not that he wants to keep going because he believes that he is on a divine mission. Rather, the desire comes first: because he wants to keep going, he believes - or tries to believe - that he is on a divine mission." (Wielenberg 4).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Not only does the mother refuse to live for her son, but she does not exhibit a moment’s remorse, anguish or worry about his future. The narrative describes the ‘coldness’ of her leaving as her ‘final gift’, showing the extent of her indifference towards her family. She leaves her husband and son, apparently without considering the impact it will have on them. The mother may be despondent, traumatized, depressed [...]. Nevertheless, the narrative’s contrasting of the father’s emotional outbursts [...] with the mother’s unemotional responses invites the reader to sympathize with the father." (Åström 120).

https://shorturl.at/ucj8u

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] his son is a unique “product” of post-apocalyptic America. The boy is not only innocent due to his tender age; as an individual who has apparently not been exposed to the thriving American consumer culture that existed prior to the apocalypse, the boy represents a new socio-economic model—the non-consumer." (Kaminsky 1).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13010

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the father’s reluctance to offer help to the man springs from his conviction that such help would ultimately imperil their own chances of survival." (Elmore 143).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.16.2.0133

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] the pair’s journey acquires an explicitly religious quality, a sense of divine mission reinforced by the antonomastic refrain of “good guys” — that is, the substituting of this phrase for their proper names — and the repetition of “carrying the fire,” phrases that become incantatory in the manner of a litany or a prayer." (Kunsa 59).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jml.2009.33.1.57

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Serving as phatic discourse more than actual exchange of information, “okay” becomes an intermediate term, resonating as neither right nor wrong. [...] Depending on context, the word shelters layers of implication yet always expresses a determination of father and son to negotiate, to agree to disagree. [...] Father and son exchange “okay”s as a means of cementing their relationship, building on the very desire to maintain a verbal link that always gestures to something more than just keeping the conversation alive." (Mitchell 222).

https://doi.org/10.1093/litimag/imv028

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"Great suffering appears to constitute evidence against the existence of a loving God, but it also has the capacity to produce or strengthen belief in such a God. It is when we suffer that we most need belief in a loving God to keep ourselves going. The more reason we have to doubt God's reality, the more we need to believe." (Wielenberg 3).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The book of Genesis depicts God as creating through speech (Genesis 1:1-31); a God that does not speak is a God that does not create. Thus, the man's declaration is that either his son is the word of God, or, for all practical purposes, the universe is a godless one." (Wielenberg 1).

http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"[...] one of Plato's most famous theories - the often debated allegory of the Cave - [...] is interwoven in [...] The Road." (Juge 16).

"In The Road's narrative, father and son indeed wander in the vastest cave ever crafted in modern literature, a post apocalyptic, "barren, silent, godless" world." (Juge 19).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"His dream is symbolical: the cave in which he wanders seems to be the ethical dilemma he is trapped in and from which he struggles to get out. [...] The dream is his subconscious fear and struggle not to succumb to instincts against the principle of ethics." (Guo 4).

https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2732

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"In the beginning of The Road, the father is awakened from a dream […]. This form of disembodiment, in the sense of losing control over one’s corporeality while surrendering to a greater force, is characteristic of the father, who struggles with his sense of body throughout the novel until his death. Thus, the father’s departure can be construed as the ultimate surrender to both the metaphorical and physical darkness." (Kaminsky 4).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13010

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"McCarthy’s dystopian tale is situated after the collapse of the “American Dream,” but it certainly engages its absence, most notably through the distinction between the consumerism of pre-apocalyptic America and the non-consumerism of the wasteland. This gap is portrayed by the inherent difference between the consumer consciousness of the father, who is portrayed at the beginning of the novel as a dreamer and a relic of American consumerism, and the son as a non-consumer, both a “pure” product of the palimpsestic wasteland and a literary allusion to anti-consumerism." (Kaminsky 5).

https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/13010

More on Worldview here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldview/

"The real darkness from the book comes not from the ashen apocalyptic world they trudge through—with all of its rust, char, and desolation, its silhouettes of life once lived buried beneath the debris of death. It comes from the smallness of the light they think is worth chasing, a light they think is inside themselves, an earthly light. [...] The man and the boy struggle all the way to the end to maintain a light of hope that is essentially dark, because it is bound to a world not that is passing away, but that has passed away." (Hibbs).

https://wm.wts.edu/read/a-reflection-on-mccarthys-the-road

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"One of the most symbolic themes of the novel is that the South - as physical space, imaginative entity and narrative focus - acts as a redemptive agency when all else seems to have vanished." (Walsh 52).

"Although ashen, wasted and ostensibly dystopian, The Road succeeds in reviving the most cherished geocentric American myth of the frontier, of a new physical, imaginative and spatial beginning. In what is a major symbolic gesture McCarthy re-inscribes this national myth; in so doing, he reverses the westerly spatial movement of his own characters, and we leave the boy as he continues to carry his light into the South." (Walsh 54).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909381

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"What does it mean to carry the fire? Throughout much of the story, the two are literally carrying fire, or at least the means to produce it. Fire sustains them; it keeps them warm and cooks their food. It allows them to play cards and allows the man to read to the child at night. Fire is the foundation of civilization. Of course, fire is also the primary implement of the destruction of civilization in The Road. Perhaps to carry the fire is to carry the seeds of civilization. If civilization is to return to the world, it will be throughthe efforts of "good guys" like the man and the child." (Wielenberg 5).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909407

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"McCarthy demonstrates that the journey of the man and boy may have been for naught, since they discover nothing that they haven’t already seen. So the end of the journey for them offers more of the same wasteland rather that John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill” or many a settler’s Promised Land. By setting his road narrative in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, McCarthy critiques the ultimate outcome of, not just Americans’, but man’s shortsightedness, vanity, and ego." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The remnant society of The Road has reached the totalizing end of capitalism, one in which everything and everyone is subject to ownership, exchange, and acquisition for consumption." (Dominy 149).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"In the absence of photosynthetic flora, the atmosphere of the planet would gradually slide into chemical equilibrium, all of its oxygen being locked away through oxidation (the rusting of iron, for example). In such an environment, fires would be increasingly difficult to ignite, relying as they do upon the presence of sufficient quantities of oxygen. Human existence would have become impossible long before such an occurrence, however, given our dependence upon oxygen. The ability to light a controlled fire, one of the activities repeated by the man and boy throughout the novel, is thus a feature of an environment which has a very specific chemical make-up, one which is conducive to life. Considered from this angle, to "carry the fire" is thus to carry the relatively modest hope that life could possibly return to the planet again, in the understanding that at least one necessary condition is still being met by the environment. While fire is closely associated with death and destruction in the novel, it also stands for life itself." (Dowd 38).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909448

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"[...] cannibalism as a critique of unchecked consumption of environmental resources and the products made with them. Images of marketing, branding, and shopping have survived the catastrophe and serve as markers of past consumption that have outlived its own heyday." (Dominy 146-147).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/cormmccaj.13.1.0143

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/?p=194

"[…] the road in the novel is very linear and stands out of the landscape as if stronger than the declining landscape, an echo of the declining society [...]." (Juge 20).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"For most road writers, the highway offers a chance for escape and represents the possibility inherent in the country itself. [...] In contrast, McCarthy corrupts the highway in The Road, both physically and in the imagination. No longer a place for safe travel and experience, the highway becomes instead a path through a destroyed land leading into an uncertain future." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"According to the Old Testament, God created Adam from “the dust of the ground”. Later, Abraham comments that he is “but dust and ashes”. This association raises the disturbing possibility that part of what the father and his son are breathing in is in fact human remains, reduced to the dust and ashes out of which humanity was created." (Pudney 295).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"If they continue south, keeping near streams and rivers and traveling generally downstream, they would eventually reach the South Carolina coast." (Morgan 45).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909380

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The story takes place in a very specific timespan wherein the structures of the past world still exist, even if only as remnants or specters, and therefore continue to influence how people think and act. These structures, which are environmental (changing weather, climate, and ecosystems), architectural (such as the roadways and city buildings), institutional (religion, science, law), and foundational (time and language), are still very much present in the main character’s mind in the sense that they continue to shape his thoughts and actions. However, they have lost their former power to order and sustain life on a grand scale." (Lodoen 87).

https://shorturl.at/Fd3vS

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"It seems to me that the importance of the route is that McCarthy is fictionally returning once again to his own roots in Knoxville and the southeast, to some of the places where the author spent the earlier years of his life. I believe that it is no accident that these places are the ones that are described in the most detail. Observations such as these would seem to make other autobiographical interpretations of the text more plausible." (Morgan 46).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909380

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The road […] helps the duo out of the Cave to the Sun through a "process of enlightenment [which] is portrayed as a journey from darkness into light" (Annas 253,) from a light they desperately seek from the Sun that will be necessary to guide them out of the Cave, and therefore out of the land of despair." (Juge 21).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream." (Brooks).

www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/books/review/review-the-road-by-cormac-mccarthy.html

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

A disease of the eye marked by increased pressure within the eyeball that can result in damage to the optic disc and gradual loss of vision.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glaucoma

"[...] the darkness of the nights and the greyness of the days here are associated with deterioration of vision, blindness and the slow disappearance of the world from view." (Pudney 296).

https://shorturl.at/Qihyk

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"The twentieth century American road narrative began as an idealistic enterprise that examined the possibility and hope in America. Yet as the century progressed, road narratives increasingly criticized problems in the country like rampant materialism and commercialization. [...] The Road [...] fits squarely within the framework of the American road narrative as cultural critique. In fact, the novel becomes perhaps the most damning condemnation of America that issues from a road narrative." (Gipko).

https://responsejournal.net/issue/2017-06/article/road-cormac-mccarthy

"Readers saw something in this book that struck them deeply: […] maybe what calls people back to its pages so frequently is a deeper truth: we know full well that we're on a road. And though our lives may feel ashen and corrupt, stuck in a swirling haze, we keep getting up. We keep hunting for firewood. We keep chasing the possibility of forgotten canned goods in the storehouse of someone else's life. We keep "carrying the fire." (Hibbs).

https://wm.wts.edu/read/a-reflection-on-mccarthys-the-road

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"McCarthy's use of the define article "the" mythologizes the road and gives it its uniqueness, out of the countable and the ordinary, and symbolizes the journey undertaken by the father and the son." (Juge 20).

https://www.jstor.org/stable/42909396

More on Worldbuilding here: https://ontheroadtotheroad7.wordpress.com/2024/11/26/worldbuilding/

"Razorous" is a made-up yet intuitively word used by McCarthy to mean "like a razor".

Moss is a very small soft green plant which grows on damp soil, or on wood or stone.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/moss

A small stream.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/brook

Twisted into a firm, messy mass.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/matted

A belt worn over the shoulder and across the breast often for the suspending or supporting of some article (such as cartridges) or as a part of an official or ceremonial dress.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bandolier

A narrow, secluded valley.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/glen

Marked with irregular fine lines or with wavy impressed lines.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/vermiculate

To cause to ripple.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wimple

Also called "fore-end", the forestock is the part of the stock of a firearm under the barrel and forward of the trigger guard.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fore-end

Broken.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stoven

When something heaves into view or heaves into sight, it appears.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/heave-into-view-heave-into-sight

A type of light brown or greyish soil, consisting of very small pieces of quartz and clay, that is blown and left behind by the wind.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/loess

Something likened to wax as soft, impressionable, or readily molded.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wax

Entered by gradual steps or by stealth.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/encroach

A rickety structure or piece of furniture is not very strong or well made, and seems likely to collapse or break.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/rickety

Plywood is wood that consists of thin layers of wood stuck together.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/plywood

A narrow piece of land with water on each side that joins two larger areas of land.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/isthmus

A least bit especially of clothing.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stitch

To reduce the light.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dim

Moorland is land which consists of moors, areas of open and usually high land with poor soil that is covered mainly with grass and heather.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/moorland https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/moor

Someone who is sullen is bad-tempered and does not speak much.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/sullen

Unpleasantly thin, often with bones showing.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/scrawny

Transporting in or as if in a wheeled vehicle.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/trundle

Breathing with difficulty usually with a whistling sound.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wheeze

A slow regular jerky pace (usually of a horse, or on horseback).

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jog-trot_n?tab=meaning_and_use#40414780

To plod through or as if through mud.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slough

Union grass, especially a tall grass.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/sea-oats_n?tab=meaning_and_use#1171082000100

A long, low and often wet area of land.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/swale

To reduce especially by eliminating superfluous matter.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prune

Usually ankle-length boots, slippers, or socks.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bootee

A tendril is something light and thin, for example a piece of hair which hangs loose and is away from the main part.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/tendril

To set (the trigger) for firing.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cock

To dig, gather, or pull out with or as if with a dredge (a machine for removing earth usually by buckets on an endless chain or a suction tube). Here it means "to draw in the sand".

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/dredge

A kind of sandal or moccasin of untanned cowhide or sealskin sewn together and tied across the instep, traditionally worn by the inhabitants of the Aran Islands. Usually in plural.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/pampootie_n?tab=meaning_and_use#32117635

Sailcloth is a strong heavy cloth that is used for making things such as sails or tents.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/sailcloth

Personal or household effects.

Interestingly, "plunder" can also mean something taken by force, theft, or fraud.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plunder

To walk through water or other liquid with some effort, because it is deep enough to come quite high up your legs, or thick.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/wade

Cut off from view.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shroud

A saucer is a small curved plate on which you stand a cup.

It could also mean "flying saucer", a round, flat object which some people say they have seen in the sky and which they believe to be a spacecraft from another planet.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/saucer https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/flying-saucer

Moving or traveling back and forth frequently.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shuttle

Hanging loosely or laxly.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/loll

In a state of extreme agitation.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/seething

Having lumps (= raised areas) on the surface.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/knobby

Slang for the buttocks.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/tokus

To run nimbly.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scamper

Long, narrow parts of some plants that contains the seeds and usually has a thick skin.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/seed-pod?q=seedpod

Frost formed by the freezing of supercooled water droplets in fog onto solid objects.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/rime

Removed color because of salt.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bleach

Seaweed or other marine vegetation that is floating in the sea or has been cast ashore.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/wrack

Lines of leaves, snow, dust, etc, swept together by the wind.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/windrow

A cove is a part of a coast where the land curves inwards so that the sea is partly enclosed.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/cove

Wood that is floating on the sea or brought onto the beach by the sea.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/driftwood

A large fern (= a type of plant) that grows thickly in open areas of countryside, especially on hills, and in woods.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/bracken

A sudden strong wind or short storm.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/squall

The fused material formed during the smelting or refining of metals.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/slag

A large container used for mixing or storing liquid substances, especially in a factory.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/vat

Keeled over to one side. "To keel over " means to turn upside down.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/careen https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/keel-over

A ship or vehicle that is built to carry liquid or gas.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/tanker

A leaden sky or sea is dark grey and has no movement of clouds or waves.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/leaden

Long curling waves of the sea.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comber

Determination and seriousness, especially when this is without humour.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/earnestness

A small flat piece separated from a whole.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/flake

A yoke is a long piece of wood which is tied across the necks of two animals such as oxen, in order to make them walk close together when they are pulling a plough.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/yoke

Boys kept by a pederast.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/catamite

A piece of equipment with straps and belts, used to control or hold in place a person, animal, or object.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/harness

To get someone to do something by gentle urging, special attention, or flattery.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/coax

A particular way of walking.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gait

Capable of being passed into or through.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/passable

To do or make something quickly and not very carefully.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cobble-together?q=cobble+something+together

Short club with a thick, heavy, or loaded end.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/bludgeon

Cords.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/lanyard

Rolled around in an ungainly manner.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/wallow

Lewd, unchaste.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/whorish

A cigar cut square at both ends.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cheroot

Thin and delicate, often in a way that is attractive.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slender

An artificial slope made of earth and/or stones.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/embankment

Covering for a bed, made of two layers of cloth with a layer of soft filling between them, and stitched in lines or patterns through all the layers.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/quilt

A narrow or winding passage.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/creek

Infested with nits [nits are the eggs of insects called lice which live in people's hair].

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nitty https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nit

Slightly burned, or damaged by fire or heat.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/scorched

With the the top half of the body bent forward and down.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stooped

Black sticky substance that is used especially for making roads.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/tar

To be subjected to the action of intense heat.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/cook

Any of various pasty materials used as protective coatings or cements.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mastic

Small broken stones used in making roads.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/macadam

Having no religion, or belonging to a religion that is not Christianity, Judaism, or Islam.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/heathen

Shallow gullies or ravines.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/draw

Thin narrow flat strips especially of wood or metal.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slat

Interestiingly, the slang word "slats" can also refer to the ribs or the buttocks.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/slats

Lacking light.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/wan_adj1?tab=meaning_and_use#15294095

Any of the parallel beams that support a roof.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rafters

Something frail, slight, or fleeting.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/wisp

Shabby, unkempt.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ratty

The strong, thick skin of an animal, used for making leather.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hide

A small saw used especially for cutting metal.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/hacksaw

Pierced, perforated.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/bore_v1?tab=meaning_and_use#16513011

Blowing strongly.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/gust?q=gust+

Snow which has been partially thawed by falling through an atmosphere of a temperature a little above freezing-point, usually accompanied by rain or snow.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/sleet_n1?tab=meaning_and_use#22195712

A person or animal that goes from one place to another looking for people to kill or things to steal or destroy.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/marauder

Long, narrow raised parts of a surface, especially a high edge along a mountain.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ridge

An outdoor fire often used as a signal fire.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/balefires

The watery substance resulting from the partial melting of snow or ice.

https://www.oed.com/dictionary/slush_n1?tab=meaning_and_use#22329555

Any of various tall grasses with slender often prominently jointed stems that grow especially in wet areas.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/reeds

To fasten with or as if with a clamp or to hold tightly.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/clamp

A material used on the surface of roads.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/blacktop

Darkness or thick cloud, preventing you from seeing clearly.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/murk

A way of walking or moving using long, relaxed steps.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/lope

"Bowel", usually used in plural, can have more than one meaning: - one of the divisions of the intestines; - the seat of pity, tenderness, or courage; - the interior parts, especially the deep or remote parts.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bowels

A calcareous deposit formed as a ring around an overflowing basin (as of a mineral hot spring).

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rimstone

A shaft, tube, or pipe, especially as used in a chimney, to carry off smoke, gas, etc.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/flue

Any mineral deposit, especially of calcium carbonate, formed in a cave by flowing water.

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/flowstone

A piece of material used especially for protecting exposed objects or areas.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tarpaulin

Souther Europeans

modernity

cheapest