This is sort of related to this thread, but different question: what was the size of the object that hit the Earth in The Road (most excellent novel by Cormac McCarthy… also a not-so-excellent movie) and where, exactly did it hit?
The novel gives a number of clues, including the fact that the narrator actually saw the light from impact, and felt the concussion. So I’m gussing it couldn’t have been too far from him. On the other hand, it was big and bad enough to blot out the sun for a decade or so after the impact, which implies a dinosaur-killing sized meteor.
Is it possible that parts of the Earth were not so afflicted by the impact, and that things were not so bad on other parts of the world? That the narrator - “the man” - was wrong to be as pessimistic as he was?
It wasn’t explicitly an asteroid or comet hitting the Earth that caused civilization to collapse in The Road (though like you that’s how I took it, and continue to think of it). It could’ve been a nuclear exchange instead. I know they don’t go through any bombed cities in the book, but then again they didn’t go through anything big enough to necessarily be a target either.
I haven’t read the book or seen the movie. I have however read quite a bit about the impact that killed the dinosaurs. Basically, a big chunk of rock landed in Mexico and debris from the impact rained down as far north as Tennessee. Not only did the sun get blocked out for quite some time by all of the stuff thrown into the atmosphere, but it literally rained fire pretty much everywhere on earth. There is a thin layer of carbon found pretty much everywhere at the K-T boundary indicating that the entire earth burned. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the shock wave from large impacts like that spreads out in an ever increasing circle until it converges at a point on the other side of the earth (the antipodal point). The shock wave from this impact was so big that it caused the crust to crack at the antipodal point and created a massive volcanic event, which spewed even more stuff up into the atmosphere. That’s pretty much a description of Hell on Earth if you ask me.
Based on your description (bright light, shock wave, but no raining debris, etc) I would have to say that if it were an impact event, it wasn’t quite as severe as the one that killed the dinosaurs.
Honestly, that’s all it was. It corresponds to nothing physical and was designed to correspond to nothing physical. It existed only to set up the fictional world he wanted to portray.
Yeah, I think this is pretty close to what he had in mind. There is constant ash falling from the sky, blowing around on the ground and coating everything. (People wear masks, to keep from breathing it, but it doesn’t do much good. The narrator dies from lung disease, coughing up blood.) He talks of cities burning in the immediate aftermath, but nothing about debris falling from the sky.
Exactly. The apocalypse described in the book killed every plant on earth and every animal other than humans. There is nothing neither natural or man-made that could conceivably cause that sort of damage.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the author/reader relationship is the way that so many readers need to literalize or particularize the text. Writers’ Big Books often - not always, to be sure, but often - are attempting to make an emotion universal. McCarthy was reaching for the simplest, most primal tragedy possible, stripped down to absolute basics of survival and interactions. Not only wasn’t he interested in the science, he actively pushed it away, knowing that any grounding in a specified event would invite readers to check the details of the world for accuracy and distract them from the big picture. He gave the equivalent of a Dantean tour of Hell, totally imaginative and totally allegorical.
For a special frosting layer of delicious irony, this is one of the very rare books in which we are absolutely certain of the author’s intentions. Overwhelmingly, asking authors to explain what they meant will receive vague responses about what the book meant to “you.” But here we know that the author meant a Metaphor. What it is a metaphor for, exactly, is back with “you,” the reader. All you start with is that the story is one of magic: “you” have been magically transported to this world, along with the characters. How the world came into being is of no more concern than how the world of Pac-Man came into being. Or, Elemental, my dear Reader.
Holden: You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand, when all of a sudden you look down…
Leon: What one?
Holden: What?
Leon: What desert?
Holden: It doesn’t make any difference what desert, it’s completely hypothetical.
Leon: But, how come I’d be there?
Holden: Maybe you’re fed up. Maybe you want to be by yourself. Who knows? You look down and see a tortoise, Leon. It’s crawling toward you…
Leon: Tortoise? What’s that?
Holden: [irritated by Leon’s interruptions] You know what a turtle is?
Leon: Of course!
Holden: Same thing.