Disturbing Imagery

At this point in the novel McCarthy has made it a point to convey to the reader how sad and disturbed this world really is. Before it was there but he didn't really shove this idea down the reader's throat. He is now prying open the reader's mouth and force feeding the disturbing events. He shows all the death and loss of human nature and expresses this through things they see.

They picked their way among the mummied figures. The black skin stretched upon the bones and their faces split and shrunken on their skulls. Like victims of some ghastly envacuuming. Passing them in silence down that silent corridor through the drifting ash where they struggled forever in the road's cold coagulate.

-McCarthy 161

Shortly before this the had encountered a giant stretch of land that was struck by a fire storm so everything was melted, charred, and destroyed. People are melted into the tar with their faces frozen in screams of agony. McCarthy uses so many words that can describe death in this short passage that it is hard not to think about how many people died from this cataclysmic event. The last sentence is particularly interesting to me because it places the father and son on a silent never ending road of death which to me says that their death is near and inevitable.
(Photo from http://media.photobucket.com/image/destroyed%20road%20corpses/sevenarts/conversations/006/morris37.jpg)

He was standing there checking the perimeter when the boy turned and buried his face against him. He looked quickly to see what had happened. What is it? he said. What is it? the boy shook his head. Oh Papa, he said. He turned and looked again. What the boy had seen was a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit. He bent and picked the boy up and started for the road with him, holding him close. I'm sorry, he whispered. I'm sorry.

-McCarthy 167

This short passage takes the cake (and hopefully not the cake they found) as the most disturbing moment of this story. McCarthy has really been building up the amount of destruction and death in the tail end of the story. It feels like he wants the reader to literally be sick from it and realize how truly terrible of an event the apocalypse is.
(Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/206812690/)

They trekked out along the crescent sweep of beach, keeping to the firmer sand below the tidewrack. They stood, their clothes flapping softly. Glass floats covered with a gray crust. The bones of seabirds. At the tide line a woven mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along the shore as far as eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.

-McCarthy 187

This description strikes me as an odd beauty that we haven't really seen in the story yet aside from the one occurrence of snow. The use of the word sepulchre makes me see it as if everything has been put to rest properly and while depressing, it is the way of life. It seems as if reaching the ocean has allowed them to accept that death is coming to them soon. The cycle of life is a beautiful thing, and now that they have almost completed the cycle this beauty is being shown through the ocean.
(Photo from http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/weather/hurricane/blog/national_weather_service/)