The Road by Cormac McCarthy
There should be a name, I think, for the type of book that you’ve absolutely heard of, that pretty much everyone has read, but that you have, somehow, managed to miss.
Well, now I have no choice but to read it, since I’ve decided to teach it this year. I know – a bold move to choose to teach a book that I haven’t actually read to impressionable youngsters. I’m a risk-taker, as the IB would have it.
As you recall from your encyclopedic knowledge of this blog and my many reviews, I have a soft spot in my heart for end-of-the-world fiction. I grew up reading The Stand by Stephen King, I’ve read Swan Song multiple times, and even enjoyed tongue-in-cheek apocalypses like Good Omens. Before going into this book, I would have considered myself an authority on all the various ends of the world.
You see, most apocalypse stories share basic qualities. They have secrets and prophecies, they have good guys and bad guys and hope for a better world after they’re over. We can easily look at the problems of our own times and extrapolate them, see how they could be so much worse, and we need to be able to hope that goodness and civilization will win out against even the most terrible of times.
Cormac McCarthy has decided not to do any of this.
In this story there is a man and a boy. They’re traveling through the ruined, ash-strewn ruins of America, looking for a place that is safe. They freeze and starve and hide from the cannibals and slavers that rove the land. They travel through ruined cities and desolate forests, never sure if the next day will bring them a respite from their misery or the finality of death.
They are moving south, down the titular road. They have a busted shopping cart and some knapsacks full of whatever they’ve managed to scrounge, some rags and remnants of clothes, and that’s about it.
Oh, and a gun. With – briefly – two bullets in it. The Man might need it to kill The Boy and himself with it. Or The Boy can use it on himself, if worse comes to worse. Dying of hunger or hypothermia is bad, sure, but there are so many things worse than dying, a final bullet doesn’t even break the top ten.
The Man, The Boy, the Cart and the Gun.
That’s pretty much all McCarthy gives us, at least as far as the plot goes. We don’t know how the world ended, or why. There is no one in charge of this post-apocalyptic hellscape. The man and the boy are not special in any real way – there is no prophecy of greatness or some hidden store of old world knowledge that can be used to bring back the golden years from before the world ended. The Man and The Boy are not trying to accomplish anything other than not dying, even though that seems to be what their entire world really wants them to do.
So if this book isn’t about un-ending the world, like so many other apocalypse stories are about, what is McCarthy doing here?
The essence of the book is the greatest existential question there is: why should we choose to live when we could choose to die instead?
In our world, of course, there are plenty of reasons to continue to live. We have cats and sunsets and taco trucks and at least another season of Wheel of Time to look forward to. We have music and dancing, true love and juicy gossip and good books and friends and family.
The Man and The Boy have absolutely none of this. They have the opposite of all this.
They have a gun. And two bullets.
When you step back and look at it, they’re in an objectively horrible situation and yet they continue to move forward. They continue to survive – to “carry the fire” as they put it – in the hope that maybe somewhere in this blasted land there will be good people that they can finally survive with. Even that hope is thin and tenuous, though, as there is very little indication that such good people exist anymore.
What’s keeping The Man going is The Boy. He’s the last thing The Man can hold on to that keeps him human, reminds him of what good can look like in the world. His purpose is to protect The Boy, and he carries out that purpose like a holy oath. Without it, he has nothing.
What’s keeping The Boy going is The Man. The Man is, of course, stronger, more knowledgeable and more capable, able to do the tasks that need doing in order to survive. The Man is his protector in a world that can be very, very unkind to little boys. And, more importantly, The Boy knows how much The Man needs him. He knows what The Man would become without him, and he can’t bear to see that happen.
The book isn’t about the world or how it ended. The book is about the two of them, and that’s it. It’s about how they survive for each other, carry each other’s fire through a cold and indifferent land.
It’s about love.
The reason to live is simply to live. To endure in the world even when things go bad. Life itself should be appreciated and protected, and that’s all the reason you need to keep going.
For all the grimness, it’s a surprisingly comforting message from the man that brought us Blood Meridian, of all things, and should lead us to ask ourselves if we truly understand the value and preciousness of the lives we lead. Life itself has value, simply by existing, and we’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Especially the cats.
“Once there were brook trouts 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. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
Cormac McCarthy on Wikipedia
The Road on Wikipedia
The Cormac McCarthy Society
The Labyrinth Library 