Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. Every generation brings new ideas about what the end of the world might look like. What are your preconceptions about the apocalypse? What literature or media are you drawing on to form these ideas?

Teaching Suggestion: The Road takes a very different approach to apocalyptic literature than most stories from the 20th and 21st century, and grounding students by getting them to think about the underlying themes and modes inherent to this kind of narrative in advance will enable them to notice the far more intimate focus of McCarthy’s book, and to absorb the theme of fatherhood against the background of a realistic depiction of the apocalypse.

• The 50 Greatest Apocalypse Novels – This roundup from LitHub may help you or your students see the different ways that the apocalypse is approached in literature.

2. The Road is a narrative that is focused around meeting the basic needs of survival and trying to move from that to a higher sense of purpose. What are your most important needs, and how would not having those needs met affect your worldview?