Analysis Of Cormac Mccarthy's The Road

Every writer has a different process that eventually leads to a finished work. A magnitude of insight is gained when a reader is granted the privilege of comparing the early drafts of a work with the published version. Seeing the writing process allows a reader to imagine the thoughts and ideas as they came to the writer, see those ideas refined and edited, and lastly it leaves the reader with a better overall comprehension of the central message being conveyed by the writer. Cormac McCarthy's The Road and his draft The Grail are distinctly different, yet through similarities it is clear to see what ideas McCarthy thought of as essential to his story. In order to focus his introduction on the story of a father and son, rather than the post-apocalyptic world around them McCarthy omitted lengthy scene's describing the setting, but kept the lines about the pair heading south.
He kept the part about the father not keeping a calendar for years, because it was a short statement that conveyed a big message about the timelessness and loss of civilization and infrastructure of his post-apocalyptic world. The Road has the same line from The Grail about the father and son heading south in order to survive. I believe McCarthy wanted to use this line to highlight the sense of urgency felt by the father to keep his son safe and to present the reader with the story of the father and son's journey. The changes that McCarthy made from The Grail to The Road resulted in a more character focused introduction of his story. McCarthy used less description of the world around the father and son and included more text about the father's actions and thoughts. McCarthy used these changes to help express his main idea about the importance of the child to the father and to set up the story of their journey