One of the responses to my post on Gone South concerned its similiarity to The Road, if any. I guess I introduced the confusion by lumping Gone South and apocalyptic iterature in the same post. I hadn’t thought about any similiarities between the two novels. Both could be considered “picaresque novels,” where characters are on a journey and respond to situations on that journey in various ways, sometimes heroic, sometimes not. The main attribute of the picaresque novel is that there is no change in the characters as the of this journey. They don’t really learn or discover anything new about themselves or the world around them. The whole point of the story is the journey itself.
However, The Road is even darker than Gone South, and is truly apocalyptic while Gone South is not. I really love first lines of novels-that is one of the things that attracted me to to Gone South. The Road, however, has one of the greatest closing paragraphs I have ever read:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were the maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not to be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
