The Road: Flashbacks 1 key example

Flashbacks are a central feature of the novel’s narrative architecture. In an “uncalendared” world with no tomorrows or long term goals, the man can only turn to the past to make sense of his nightmarish present. Flashbacks frame his experience of this post-apocalyptic world by contrasting it against his past.

By extension, they inform the reader’s engagement with the novel’s setting, too. On the beach at night, the man recollects a similar, earlier time:

He remembered waking on one such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of the driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again.

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