ate the last of the morels and a can of spinach. In the night a storm broke in the mountains above them and came cannonading downcountry cracking and booming and the stark gray world appeared again and again out of the night in the shrouded flare of the lightning ...

We are also offered glimpses into the father's thinking, with the narration sliding from omniscience into the father's mind, a form of narration called free indirect discourse, a technique most associated with the writer Jane Austen:

He hadn't kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

The father not keeping a calendar for years is information provided by the omniscient narrator. The "no surviving another winter" are the direct thoughts of the father.

What the narrative voice doesn't do is give us a context for what is going on. We know there was a different kind of past that the father remembers, we understand that then something happened, and we realize that now he and his son are existing in a harsh post-apocalyptic present, but what caused the change is never explained. The narrative "camera" also doesn't pull back and give us names, for instance, for the characters or tell us what the father was once was or did. The focus is on the relentlessness of trying to survive in the present. What snatches of the past we get are the glimpses of memories as the father deals with his present, and these glimpses are generic:

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.

The narrative technique thrusts us into a disorienting eternal present, helping us to experience reality as the father does. By keeping the narrative voice so generally expressionless while providing numerous details, the authorial voice also withdraws, allowing the reader to experience his or her own emotional response without being told what to think.

Typical of McCarthy is a tendency to stay at a distance from the inner monologue of characters. His focus on the external and the detached and dry voice narrative voice is quite uncommon in most modern literature, bringing to mind the naturalist movement of nearly a century prior to his work. The Road is no exception. Frequently, however, the reader does get visceral and jarring insights into the character of the man, sometimes through third person omniscient accounts and sometimes even through first person sections. This creates a disorienting effect, placing the reader into the bleak landscape along with the man and the boy.

The reason that McCarthy creates a detached voice that is notably separate from the inner monologues of the characters is the same reason that he chooses not to give the characters names. It is because the pasts, names, and even, to a certain extent, the thoughts and emotions of the characters are not important when compared to their representation as any ordinary people. What makes them unique characters is not their traits, but their circumstances. McCarthy is writing about a universal plight of humanity against a hostile environment far more intently than he is writing about any individual and internal conflict.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road traces the determined struggle of a father and son to make some sense of their post-apocalyptic world. Desperate to ensure a future for his son, the father goes to extraordinary lengths to keep himself and his son alive and to recognize opportunity and danger. McCarthy purposefully creates a setting that is desolate and unforgiving, confusing and extremely scary and which causes conflict and distress with every sentence. The road they are traveling is unnamed, the characters are unnamed, the potential for death is almost overwhelming and the punctuation in the novel is almost non-existent. When detail is provided it is very significant.

At the beginning, the third-person narrator remains outside the story and observes what the boy and his father do. As the struggle continues, the father exposes himself, and the text is sometimes in the third person and other times in the first. For example, when he talks of his wife, he is invested in the memories but remains distinct from them. The memories are his, and no event will change that. However, the memories are often painful so he remains outside of them. It is the recollection which brings him down to earth, even momentarily, and he is left in the midst of the situation. This is why McCarthy uses this method: to ensure that the reader can also be more than an observer. 

The reader has to remain extremely vigilant, just like the father and son; otherwise the narrative becomes difficult to follow. This reveals the father's own sense of complete disorientation and his efforts to sometimes remove himself from the center of the story when it becomes too much to bear. The third-person narrator then completes the story, ensuring that there is no emotion because that could get them killed, such as when they meet Ely and the boy is anxious to make a connection, something his father does not relish.   

The series of questions and answers between father and son help establish the theme of perseverance. The father says, "This is what the good guys do. They keep trying. They don't give up." However, there are times when the father does feel like giving up. His flashbacks confuse and unsettle him. He has to be part of the story but an outside narrator can give a realistic picture that keeps the grief and futile nature of their journey at a distance. The narrative gives new hope to the plight of father and son in an untenable situation. "Carrying the fire" and recognizing the "good guys" from the bad becomes all-consuming and it is the narrative voice that reveals the feelings and state of hopelessness or hope (depending on which circumstances the father and son find themselves in). When they find themselves at the father's childhood home, "Raw cold daylight fell through from the roof. Gray as his heart..." These memories are too real for an observer but they are too painful for the father and McCarthy uses this to his advantage in giving purpose where otherwise there may not be any.