McCarthy explores a new road in his piercing, apocalyptic novel.
In your stereotypical post-apocalyptic story, a resilient band of survivors always remains. Determined to persevere, they miraculously stumble upon much-needed food, stores of weapons, and historic paraphernalia, à la On the Beach or The Stand. The reader is well aware that they are surrounded on all sides by enemies and are exposed to the elements, but somehow, despite the odds, this tribe (curiously well-balanced in gender and ethnicities) strides forth to set up a new world order. This optimistic narrative is done away with in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a terrifyingly simple yet gripping tale that reminds us of just how fragile our lives are.
A Rhode Islander uprooted to rural Tennessee, McCarthy began as a Southern writer with what Gordon Hauptfleisch dubbed a “mean Faulknerian streak.” His relocation to Texas ten years later generated a new style. McCarthy distinguished himself as a Western writer, best know for his Blood Meridian, a tale of a runaway turned gang member on the Texas-Mexico border, and the 1999 acclaimed Border Trilogy — All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain — three coming-of-age novels centered on two cowboys traveling the West. The much-anticipated No Country for Old Men was published seven years later; a film of the same name based on the book took home this year’s Oscar for Best Picture.
McCarthy’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel The Road marks another reinvention; although it exemplifies the same dark fascination with bleakness characteristic of his other works, McCarthy now turns to a new subject. Whereas his former novels deal with issues of men battling against each other, this text is set in a world where humankind has been obliterated. McCarthy shifts his setting from the American West to post-Armageddon world in the aftermath of unspecified cataclysm. The narrative follows two survivors, an unnamed man and his young son, as they journey south in the hope of finding a better life. They scrounge for food. They live on whatever they can find, be it fish caught from rivers that run black, rotting meat or dried apricots, “wrinkled effigies of their former selves.” They grovel through the ash. They sleep in wet, dark forests. They cover their feet with tarp so that they stop bleeding. And yet they walk on. They have no choice but to continue towards nothingness, as they try to repress what they see around them. McCarthy paints a shockingly real picture of life in this new world — death has never come so near.
The need to survive means the man and his son do without whatever is not absolutely necessary. For McCarthy, this translates into a disdain for frivolous detail; his writing cuts to the bare minimum needed to give his readers a clear picture of what is going on. In short paragraphs and simple but brutally honest descriptions he brings on one horror after the next, giving us a magnificently simple account of life after the world dies.
The only glimmers of hope shine when the father finds a few putrid potatoes in an abandoned supermarket, or collects dried seeds from the floor of a barn to chew in order to pacify his hunger. All that remains of civilization are decaying shells of life: hollowed-out RVs, houses burned to the ground, corpses “dried to leather, grimacing at the day,” trees “sprawled like traffic victims” over their path.
With no clear beginning or end to their journey, the plot centers on the moment, the man fighting to keep himself and his son alive at all costs. “This is my child. I washed a dead man’s brains out of his hair,” he tells himself. “That is my job.” A part of sustaining his son is keeping his goodness from being destroyed. He tries to shield his son from as much of the horror as possible, realizing that “once something’s in your memory it can’t be taken away.”
As they continue, they come across a farmhouse; while the boy pleads to keep going, the man tells him that they must go into it. McCarthy keeps his readers in suspense — whatever is inside is not welcoming, but, half-starved, they don’t have much of a choice. Locked in the basement are skeletal human beings waiting to be cannibalized by their captors, grasping for the breath to cry out for help. In the face of these atrocities, the man tells his son to “make a list. Recite a litany. Remember” who they are and what they stand for — they are the “good guys” and they must keep going. In an interview with Oprah, McCarthy admitted that the father-son relationship is based on his rapport with his own eight-year-old son. McCarthy explained that as a parent, “You always have that hope that today I’m going to do something better than I’ve ever done.” But what if there is no tomorrow?
In a world where every moment is uncertain, father and son are all each other has, they are “each the other’s world entire.” To protect this bond, the man will do whatever it takes to keep them safe. The man’s ruthless drive to survive is pitted against the boy’s innocence and willingness to help those around them. When a stranger steals everything they own on the beach, the boy pleads for the ailing man’s life, while his father is not so forgiving. “I [did] to him what he was going to do to us” the man argues later. “I wasn’t going to kill him.”
“But we did kill him” is his son’s reply. The boy’s naivete is often what creates trouble, but it also stems from an innocence that pushes them to keep going. When the man shoots an attacker who held the boy at knifepoint, he explains to the boy: “My job is to take care of you. … I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.” In this savage world God seems far from omnipresent. Indeed on many occasions the man envies the dead; he admits that the “the boy was all that stood between him and death.”
For all of his unwillingness to explain why they are marching and what they are marching for to the boy, the man is right — goodness appears just in time. Shortly after his father’s death, the boy is taken in by a family that has been following them. It seems God has not completely abandoned them; he appears right on cue. But what lies ahead remains a mystery. The choice to rebuild a dead world or die trying is left open. McCarthy presents us with brutally honest and unsettling portrayal of an alternative world where moral codes are turned upside down. No matter what you believe in, The Road is a compelling novel that captures your attention by crystallizing what is most important.
Allegra Richards ’09 (amrichar@fas) is cautiously optimstic about the end of the world.