Colour Imagery in The Road
Grey Examples Ash, snow, dawn, afternoon, light, sea/river foam, mist, sea.
Quotes “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world.”
“The shape of a city stood in the greyness like a charcoal drawing sketched across the waste.”
“He looked at the sky. A single grey flake sifting down.”
“The wet grey flakes … grey slush by the roadside.”
“…the stark grey world appeared again and again out of the night.”
“The chary dawn, the cold illucid world … A colourless world of wire and crepe.”
“The man squatted and looked at the grey and wasted figure under the tilted sheet of plywood.”
Symbolism Lifelessness, barrenness, corruption of the pure (snow), inevitability, monotony.
Black Examples Water, blacktop (asphalt), dead trees, road, ice, stones, diesel smoke, burned effigies
Quotes “The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening… No sound but the wind in those bare and blackened trees… that cold autistic dark.”
“The black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash.”
“The fire was dead and black on the ground.”
“Dark of the invisible moon, the nights only slightly less black.”
“The thin black trees.” “The hot black mastic sucking at their shoes.”
“Sketched upon the pall of soot downstream the outline of a burnt city like a black paper scrim.”
“The soft black talc blew through the streets like squid ink uncoiling along a sea floor.”
“Everything melted and black… Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling.”
Symbolism Death, isolation, stasis, invisibility, corruption, fear, a hostile world.
Blue Examples Tarpaulin, sky (in dreams), “frail blue flame” of the lighter
Quotes “Sited there in the darkness the frail blue shape of it looked like the pitch of some last venture at the end of the world.”
“And the child and the sky was aching blue but he was learning how to wake himself from just such siren worlds.”
“Is it blue? ... The sea? I don’t know. It used to be.”
“I’m sorry it’s not blue, he said. That’s okay, said the boy.”
“He kept asking him about his shoulder, blue and discoloured from where he’d slammed it against the hatch door. It’s all right, the man said. It doesn’t hurt. We got lots of stuff.”
“…turned and lay holding the child, watching the blue flames through the plastic.”
Symbolism Hope, survival, safety.
Red/ Examples orange Blood spray (coughing), scarves/clothing of marauders, balefires, forest-fires, snow in firelight, the boy’s birth (memory), lines on the map
Quotes “…stark and gray and a raw red mudbank where a roadworks lay abandoned.”
“There fires burning high in the mountains and at night they could see the light from them deep orange in the soot-fall.”
“All wearing red scarves at their neck, red or orange, as close to red as they could find.”
“On the grey snow a fine mist of blood.”
“The snow orange and quivering. The colour in it moved something in him long forgotten.”
“He held aloft the scrawny red body so raw and naked…”
“… this tiny paradise trembling in the orange light from the heater and then he fell asleep.”
Symbolism Obstacles to be overcome, the scarred earth, danger, comfort, the journey.
Yellow Examples The boy’s hair, toy truck, brick hearth in father’s old home, gold scrollwork in memory of theatre visit with wife, items from the boat, the new man in the yellow parka at the end.
Quotes “He sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god.”
“They walked through the dining room where the firebrick in the hearth was as yellow as the day it was laid because his mother could not bear to see it blackened.”
“The boy found toys he’d forgot he had. He kept out a yellow truck and they went on with it sitting on top of the tarp.”
“He found a pair of yellow rubber seaboots… and pulled on the stiff yellow breeches.”
“Inside was a yellow plastic flashlight… a yellow plastic EPIRB…”
“The man that hove into view and stood there looking at him was dressed in a gray and yellow ski parka.”
Symbolism Rescue, hope for mankind, salvation, and some items represent a golden world that has gone and the redundancy of those items in this new world.