Voice and Point of View

The Road is written in third person, in the voice of an omniscient narrator, which the characters referred to as 'he' or 'the boy'.
However, with in this, McCarthy manipulates and plays with narrative voice and the point of view from which the story is seen.
Here are some of the things you might find interesting to explore in the reaction to the narrative voice of The Road.
>> 3rd person voice, omniscient point of view.
>> 3rd person voice, from the point of view of the man.
>> 3rd person voice, from the point of view of the boy.
>> Unattributed dialogue (i.e. without 'he said').
>> Decontextualised dialogue (without commentary from the narrator).
>> Unattributed thoughts (i.e. without 'he thought').
>> Not signalling where the narrative ends and dialogue or the thoughts of a character in the first person begins.
>> 3rd person free indirect style where the reader not only feels he/she is seeing events from a characters perspective but that it is in the characters own words, not those of a narrative voice.

Page 306 ("Once there were brook..") - the end
>> A nice finish to the end of a dark and depressing story.
>> A picturesque image of what they have longed for throughout the novel.
>> Slight reference to what the man has been dreaming of - fish.
>> Filmic, you can imagine a film running as someone is narrating over the top.
>> Different possibilities of narrators, different people who have had the chance to follow them, such as the family, little boy, old man etc.
>> The paragraph is very different to the rest of the novel, as it shows a proper image in ful description.

I feel that McCarthy foreshadows the decaying world at the end of the novel, suggesting there was no point in mentioning it right at the start because it can't be saved. He writes that there were maps of the world in it's becoming on the backs of the fish and that it would not be made right again.