ENG 270
Jeff Abernathy
11/11/07
Relationships and Hope in The Road
The connecting factor in people’s lives is the relationships they form with others. When a mother hears tornado sirens wailing in her vicinity, she does not grab her wedding china or her Louie Baton handbag before dashing to the basement for safety. She gathers her children, her husband, her dog, her sister, her mother. People try to protect the ones closet to them in times of danger. In times of happiness, people also bring those they care about to celebrate. When families gather for the holidays, they do not toast their extravagant houses, their SUVs, their electronic equipment. They toast their families, thankful they were able to all be together, thankful that everyone is healthy and safe. Relationships are what tie us together. McCarthy uses this relationship and the landscape around the pair to represent hope. The hope that is wrapped up between the two, the constant reassurances that they are together and safe, and the proof of goodness in this terrible society are all what drives them, and McCarthy’s readers, to the end of this journey.
Relationships and hope for the future are what tie the father and son together in The Road. These two traverse the devastating countryside, living for nothing more than each other. The father places all of his hope for the future in his son; his wife did not. His wife kills herself in the absence of hope, “My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born…my only hope is for eternal nothingness” (57). She knows that if they stay, they will be raped, killed, and perhaps eaten. He begs his wife not to leave them, but instead she hopes for death in place of a hellish life. Her husband remains with their son, seemingly hoping that his wife will be wrong and his son will have a chance at a better life.
The relationship between the father and son what pulls them through to the end. The father dies, but has trained his son to survive without him and to kill himself in times of danger. The boy could have resigned himself to death after he loses his father, but does not. He is devastated, yes, but is able to meet with the group of travelers who are some of the remaining good guys. The unlimited love the father has for his son is amazing, especially when we see a group of people who use a baby as a food source. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Cormac McCarthy admits that he would not have written this book if it had not been for his son. He first came up with the premise for this book while on a trip with his then four-year-old son John Francis, to whom the book is dedicated. He was up early one morning, overlooking the New Mexican horizon when he imagined what the world would look like in fifty to one hundred years. As he did this, he looked down at his peaceful, sleeping son. He wrote several pages then, but let the idea rest until a few years later. The fact that the premise of the book is based on the father -son relationship highlights the importance of it, and the importance of relationships.
J.A. Gray forgets about the compassionate scenes that highlight the tenderness between the father and son when he claims that McCarthy reduces humanity to a bloody monstrosity in his language. Yes, there are plenty of horrifying images within this book, but hope does appear in the littlest signs of humanity throughout the book. Humanity is the acknowledgement that people are more sophisticated than animals; they thus treat each other compassionately and justly. The little signs of life that provide a type of guiding light for this lonesome pair are signs of the remaining strains of humanity. The boy constantly checks with his father that they are still the good guys. They know they are good because they are “carrying the fire” (McCarthy 83). This fire that they carry is itself the hope of humanity: the hope that people can remain good in this terrible, haunting world. This hope for others and for the survival of themselves allows the father and son to share special moments of peace and happiness. When the father discovers a Coke can, it is amazingly still full and carbonated. The father gives it to the son to enjoy and they both sit and take pleasure in the moment; it’s a moment abnormal to them but completely normal to McCarthy’s readers. Here, McCarthy shows how something so incredibly simple can mean so much. He does not reduce humanity to a bloody monstrosity. He shows how compassionate we can be even in such a terrible situation as the death of the world.
Janet Maslin acknowledges the tenderness between this pair, and that they are constantly making sure they are still “the good guys.” The father constantly checks, visibly and physically, to make sure that his son is alive and close. This use of touch and sight is extremely important in maintaining their humanity and their hope. When the boy is scared, the father stays within sight and usually also within physical reach. In the scene right before they discover the group of half-eaten people detained in the basement, we see this tenderness. “The boy hung on to his hand. He was terrified” (McCarthy 107). In this passage, the father constantly reassures the boy that they are ok; they need to look here for food. The boy is so afraid of what may be in the basement, yet he does not let his father out of his sight. Once they are able to see what exactly is in the basement, the father realizes the horrible mistake in judgment he made and grabs the boy to make their escape. The sense of touch is also used as a comforting offer. In the beginning of their journey, the father embraces his son to protect him from the sight of boiled bones and a pool of human insides. The father carries the son to allow him to sleep while they travel. When he does this, “(the son falls) asleep on his shoulder instantly” (McCarthy 116) surrounded as he is by his father’s comforting arms. The father uses touch to comfort his son. After they leave the place where the boy sees the other little boy, the father must hold his son to get him to sleep. The father also reassures himself at night by stroking his son’s hair; he is both checking to make sure they boy is still alive in order to support his quest and he is stroking as one would a pet. He calms himself, and perhaps his son, by this gesture of compassion. The sense of touch constantly proves that it is the human connection that keeps people going.
For the majority of the book, the father takes care of the son, but it is the son who holds the goodness of humanity. The father has been hardened out of necessity; he needs to be suspicious and cold to everyone they meet in order to protect his son. His son, on the other hand, is openly compassionate to those they meet; this is another sign of humanity that keeps them readers going through the end. The boy is a symbol of hope himself and his goodness supports his father’s quest. We can understand why the father struggles so much to keep his son alive outside of the father-son relationship. The son is a “Golden chalice, good to house a god” (McCarthy 75). He is inherently good and because of this we want him to live. If McCarthy had written the book to kill off the son, readers would have been disheartened. We know that the father is dying; his sickness is evident. However, we do not want the father’s struggle to be in vain. We also want the boy to live because we want some hope for ourselves if we were ever in this type of situation. We want to have a sense that we would have a chance at surviving through this and the boy’s goodness and survival give us hope. He gives us hope that it is possible not to fall to cannibalism and savagery. It may be possible to live compassionately in an uncompassionate world.
The son shows his compassion in his concern for those they meet. In the early part of their journey, the boy physically gets upset when they cannot help someone they come across. They pass a burnt, ragged traveler early on in their trip, a man who has been struck by lightening. The boy asks his father if they can help the man. His father denies his request. The boy asks again and his father is adamant that they can do nothing. The boy cries as they leave the burnt man and the father has to apologize to him profusely to calm him. The next morning, the boy is still upset and will not talk to his father. The father tries again to reason with him, but the boy is still housing resentment. He says he is not mad and that he will talk to his dad, but as a reader I do not believe it. The boy says, “okay” (McCarthy 52) more as a way of resigning to his father’s decision, not as being satisfied with it.
When the boy comes across the seemingly abandoned boy about his own age, he tries to help him. The other boy runs away and leaves our traveler crying in the road. His father does not believe him when he says there was a boy and drags him up again. The boy is extremely distraught, he will not stop looking back as his father pulls him along, neither will he stop crying. He worries that the boy does not have anyone to take care of him, “I’m afraid for that little boy” (McCarthy 86). He tells his dad that he would share his food with the other boy if they went back for him, but his father refuses. This gets the boy upset again, he constantly disagrees with his father, saying “‘we could go back…it’s not too late’” (McCarthy 86). The boy is constantly upset by this situation; it even affects him through the end of their journey. His compassion is relentless as he wishes he could help this boy.
Further along on their journey, after they leave the house of the half-eaten people, the boy questions his father once again. He wants to be able to help the hostages since he knows that the people who lived in the house are going to kill the ones they have captured in the basement. He asks his father, “Why do they have to do that?” (McCarthy 127). His father does not have an answer for him. Then the boy asks twice if the captors are going to eat their hostages, and his father confirms this after the second time. The boy asks, “‘we couldn’t help them because then they’d eat us too…and that’s why we couldn’t help them’” (McCarthy 127). The father verifies this, but the boy really is not truly satisfied. He knows why they cannot help everyone; if they are supposed to survive, they cannot trust anyone and cannot take chances that place their lives at risk. This does not mean that he agrees that this is right. He says, “Okay” (McCarthy 127) to his father’s reasoning, but is not fully reconciled to this decision. As their journey progresses, he loses more of his innocence. The repetition in this sequence shows that he tries to understand his father’s reasoning, but it also shows that he does not agree fully with him. The boy would rather try to help those people.
These situations prove that the boy is merciful and compassionate. His sense of what is right is almost unbelievable in this heart-breaking world. Tom Shy claims that the final scene of the book highlights an “improbable vision of redemption and goodness” (Shy 40). He believes that nothing in the book suggests that the good people would inherit the earth and this startling ending seems incongruous. However, I think the boy’s sense of compassion that is evident in scenes like these proves that humanity can still exist even when many people turn animalistic and eat their children.
The Road is an unforgettable story about a man and his boy. Marc Cunningham makes a valid claim that The Road is a compassionate, life-affirming expedition. The tenderness between the father and son is moving and sentimental. The father puts everything in his son; the son is the reason the father is even trying so hard to survive. The mother knows this but cannot do it herself, “The one thing I can tell you is that you won’t survive for yourself” (McCarthy 57). She only hopes for death and sees nothing else beyond it. Her husband hopes for something better; he hopes and thus works for the survival of his son. I was personally moved by McCarthy’s book, and agree with this Keir Graff that it is a book that will affect many people masterfully. McCarthy does present hope in a seemingly hopeless world- the discovery of the bunker, of the apples, of extra blankets and shoes. He discusses the fleeting nature of this world as he confronts death. One cannot escape from death in this book, and some, like the boy’s mother, welcome it.
We are all dying from the day we are born and with this slow death comes the disappearing of our worlds. We do not remember what it was like to be born, to learn to walk, to learn to talk. As we go through life, our day to day troubles and triumphs are forgotten. As the boy and his father travel down this road, the good times of the past are slowly weaned out and all they can think about is surviving. Even so, little remnants of hope from the old world survive into this one. The coca-cola they find, the cans of food that keep them going, the gorgeous brass sextant, all of these remind the man of earlier times. Looking at the sextant, he felt that “it was the first thing he’d seen in a long time that stirred him” (McCarthy 228). These occurrences give him the physical sustenance to keep going as well as the emotional motivation.
Beauty also provides sustenance, but it rarely appears in this mostly dead landscape. When the boy and man are traveling through the terrible aftermath of the world’s death, they rarely see something beautiful. When the father looks across the dark horizon, he sees dead fields, dead grass, dirty gray snow and gray ash. They see burnt houses and people, decaying bodies, rusted pipes and fences. The father seems to lose hope and begins think that death creeps nearer and nearer. He does not mourn death, rather muses over “beauty or goodness” (McCarthy 129). He does not think about these ideas anymore since he cannot see them. They exist only in his son, not in the landscape around him. They only visibly see beauty when they do not need to fear the world around them, as when they are in the bunker, their “tiny paradise” (McCarthy 150). Here, McCarthy uses color to describe scenarios, whereas we previously only saw gray. In the bunker, the boy’s hair is golden; the heater’s light is orange. The fear returns once the father realizes they cannot remain here, and the world again is ugly in ashes and sheet metal. As they continue on their journey, beauty continues to be related to hope. When they have fire, they are warm and hopeful for their lives and McCarthy describes the fire as red. When they are cold and worrying about freezing to death, everything is gray. Their goal is to see the sea, hoping that life will be better there. The father tells the son that it will be blue, but when they arrive it is just as gray as the rest of the world. Here, disappointment appears but the two move past it and hope remains even after the father’s death. The final scene represents the hope that the father lived and died for. He wanted his son to find a better life, and his goal realizes itself after his death. A rough, weather beaten man dressed in a yellow parka finds the boy and takes him more of the good guys. They came to a land with a brook full of fish swimming strongly in amber water. These trout, with their muscular bodies and their smooth, white fins have “maps of the world in its becoming” (McCarthy 287) engraved on their backs. These are maps dating back to before man, to a time when the world was first created. That these fish still exist is a symbol of hope. Life continues even after destruction.
Kennedy is correct when he claims that The Road is written tersely but imaginatively. The horrible images that arise out of this journey are some of the most devastating ideas a person could dream up in their worst nightmares. The half-eaten people trapped in the dark basement, the blackened and charred infant on the spit, the burnt and decaying bodies stuck to the road with their final screams etched across their faces are some of the images I will not soon forget. McCarthy is a master of the terrifying. The contrast of this evil with the goodness rings of hope for humanity. The tenderness exhibited between the father and son is a sign of hope. The contrast of the landscape’s ugliness and beauty flows to support the sense of hope McCarthy promotes. If, in a time of such ruin and suffering, we can see the remains of human goodness, there is hope for humanity. This is how I read McCarthy’s book: the contrast of hope and despair and how hope will pull us through, no matter how desolate our situation seems.
Works Cited
Pilkington, Tom. "Apocalypse Now." American Book Review 28.2 (Jan. 2007): 19-20. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [Library name], [Rock Island], [IL]. 29 October 2007.
Boudway, Matthew. "Christmas Critics." Commonwealth 133.21 (01 Dec. 2006): 19-20. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL]. 29 October 2007.
Cunningham, Mark Allen. "The Art of Reading Cormac McCarthy." Poets & Writers 35.5 (Sep. 2007): 33-37. First Search. OCLC. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL]. 18 October 2007.
Graff, Keir. “The Road.” Booklist.(Aug. 2006). Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL]. 18 October 2007.
Gray, J. A. " The Road." First Things: A Monthly Journal of Religion & Public Life (May 2007): 54-55. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL]. 29 October
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Kennedy, William. “Left Behind.” New York Times. (08 Oct. 2006) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/books/review/Kennedy.t.html?_r=1&ei=5070&en=0324f5e98c185fe7&ex=1188792000&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin
Maslin, Janet. “The Road Through Hell, Paved With Desperation.” New York Times. (25. Sept. 2006). 18. October 2007. <>
McCarthy, Cormac. Personal Interview with Oprah Winfry. 5 June. 2007. Retrieved 11 October 2007 from
http://www.oprah.com/obc_classic/featbook/road/interview/road_interview_main.jhtml
Ryan, Tom. "Cormac McCarthy's Catholic sensibility." National Catholic Reporter 43.26 (04 May 2007): 13-14. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL]. 29 October 2007.
Shy, Todd. "The Road." Christian Century 124.5 (06 Mar. 2007): 38-41. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL]. 18 October 2007.
