Brian
EN 270
November 11 2007
On the surface, The Road is a novel about the physical damage done to the once proud civilizations of earth. When explored with more depth, however, it quickly becomes apparent that this novel is also about the damage this world destruction has on personal identity of the civilized population. Through the example of the unnamed father and son (who was born into this insane world), we are shown the many facets of identity that have been either completely destroyed or reshaped. The total fragility of identity becomes exposed, thus questioning how we define ourselves individually, when the Father is asked: “What are you?” and is unable to answer. In this desolate world, we see a once established, educated man’s presumably complicated identity become reduced to rubble along with society and its buildings. While piecing together this degeneration of sorts, and witnessing the barbarism of the rest of the population, the reader is forced to the startling realization that societal values and cultural trends do not in fact comprise our true identities. The old world, representing the old way of identity, shows its true fragile colors, making it clear throughout the course of the novel that our true identities are comprised of our core selves. At this core, McCarthy vividly portrays the polar opposites of good and bad characterized respectively by freedom and freedom with responsibility. The good in the novel realize that humans must realize their responsibility and calling to moral action. Through the destruction of superficial identity, and the exposure of self taking precedence over morality, McCarthy gives the reader a vivid glimpse into what true human identity could be, and what he thinks true human identity should be.
One of the first things that Cormac McCarthy establishes is the fact that in this world, self definition through the old values of society has become impossible. Current materialistic values have disappeared with the focus of most of humanity on survival. These superficial values are exposed through the hypothetical situation of world-wide destruction. The father, as the book progresses, finds many artifacts of his old civilization, and in turn, his realization of their fragility and superficiality grows immensely. While he does fully realize these qualities of the old world, he is reluctant to fully let go of his attachment to them, representing his inability to fully come to define himself without connection to the material goods of the former society. The son, as the voice of the new world and new identity, represents the opposing voice to his father’s reluctance to let go of the past world completely. He shows little care about his father’s memories, and instead focuses on what is left in their world. In grasping onto what little is left of the old world, the father shows how strong the ties of this superficial identity hold on to people.
The first artifact that the father finds along his journey is, simply, a can of Coca Cola. Rummaging around in a desolate store, the father reaches into a soda machine, “withdrew his hand slowly and sat looking at a Coca Cola” (McCarthy 23). While this may seem like a simple object, it symbolizes an entire way of life as both the father and son realize the fact that they will never taste the soda again: when the father hesitantly sips the soda, in order to let the boy have more, the boy says “it’s because I wont ever get to drink another one, isn’t it?” (McCarthy 24). This simple interaction shows us just how isolated the former society has become from the present one. The father responds to his son by saying “Ever’s a long time” (McCarthy 24). In his reluctance to cast off his old society as gone forever, the father shows his attachment to even the smallest symbol of who he used to be.
The next day after finding the Coca Cola can, the father and son happen upon the father’s old house. When they arrive there, the father asks the son, “don’t you want to see where I used to live?” (McCarthy 25). The son, in a rejection of the old values, responds with a cold “No.” The father goes into the house despite his son’s wishes, and as he walks through, he exhibits his immense longing for his old life as “he [pushes] open the closet door half expecting to find his childhood things.” Of course, he finds nothing, only emptiness in place of what he used to identify himself with.
While these examples do truly show the fragility of what the father based his identity on, the ultimate symbol of this attachment, and also the father’s realization that this world of false connections comes when the father wakes suddenly from a dream. After waking up, “he turned to look at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect” (McCarthy 153). This shows the father’s understanding that he has been living in one world which is new to him, whilst believing and teaching his child of the values and structures of the old world that he used to inhabit. The child and the unwelcome setting of the post apocalyptic world of The Road are unwelcoming to this teaching, and regard his priorities as alien.
With “the frailty of everything revealed at last” to the father, and “old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night” (McCarthy 28), the reader is left to look for what is left of the identity of the inhabitants of The Road. In highlighting what is actually alive in this world, it becomes clear that, through their actions, people become defined by their core morals and values. Sense of core individual identity is strong within the two travelers of The Road, and in their contrast to the majority, two given group identities are formed within the novel: Good Guys and Bad Guys. Through these two competing groups, the reader is able to see a clear division between correct and incorrect human values as perceived by McCarthy. On one hand, we see the amoral majority who has been reduced to irresponsibly using any means necessary to survive; on the other hand, we see the Father and Son together have clear moral boundaries which they refuse to cross. As the presence of Good and Bad are so strong, and the moral division so obvious, McCarthy is clearly showing the difference between freedom and freedom with responsibility.
As these moral distinctions are all we have to judge the current identity of the characters themselves, McCarthy is showing us through the stripped down prose what he feels humans could potentially be when stripped down to their core values. In contrasting the majority’s actions with the actions of the father and son, however, McCarthy wants to show the reader the responsibility and morality with which humans should use to mold their core values. Throughout these distinctions, it becomes clear that the main difference between the two groups is that the Good Guys define their true self as “the one you find through love and through your relations with family and friends” (Culler 113), while the Bad Guys will do almost anything for self-preservation. Truly, the father (besides his minor attachment to the old society) and son adhere to this version of the true self, as they were “each the other’s world entire” (McCarthy 6). They base their decisions on their true selves, refusing to make decisions that go against their moral code, whether the decisions would help them personally or not.
The major action that divides the Good Guys and Bad Guys in the novel is the practice of cannibalism. More than just an act to be horrified with, cannibalism in The Road represents the great selfishness with which people of the world act. The many instances of cannibalism show the ease with which the Bad Guys in this world sacrifice what should be meaningful personal connections for their own personal survival. For example, in a shocking event, the father and son witness two men and a woman walk by them on the road. Later, when they discover an untended campfire, they also find “a charred human infant headless and gutted and blackening on the spit” (McCarthy 198). The reader is left to assume that the only people who could have committed this act were the two men and pregnant woman. These two men, one of whom presumably caused the woman to become pregnant, clearly had some sort of significant connection since they were traveling together. All three of the travelers, in attempting to eat the baby that was born, sacrifice interpersonal connection in the name of personal survival.
Personal survival taking precedence over interpersonal connection should not happen, according to McCarthy. As the contrast to this bad quality, the father and son refuse to eat anyone. After finding a house in which people were imprisoned by Bad Guys specifically to be eaten, the boy asks his father “They’re going to kill those people, aren’t they?” after his father’s affirmation of the question, the boy asks “Why would they have to do that?” (McCarthy 127). The fact that the boy would question the reason for the murder of the people in the basement proves his unwaveringly good qualities by showing that the thought of doing something as horrible as this has never even crossed his mind. The subsequent conversation between the father and son verifies they will never eat anyone, no matter what: “We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?” the boy asks. The man responds by saying “No. Of Course not” (McCarthy 128). They refuse to eat anyone, “even if [they’re] starving” (McCarthy128), and that shows the reader that, unlike the Bad Guys, the Good Guys have moral boundaries that they will never cross, even if staying on their side of that line means certain death, as starvation does. In this sharp contrast, we find that the father and son stay true to their higher moral code while the Bad Guys do anything for survival.
The Bad are unthinking in terms of morality, and the father and son are shown to hold their moral lines all throughout the novel. This contemplative morality brings the father and son face to face with two issues that are not attended to enough in this world: facing death and considering the nature of God. Through the course of the novel, it becomes clear that contemplating these two issues is very much a part of Good core identity, and as such, must be actively examined by every human being. The father and son provide an example of active inquiry of these issues by physically moving down the road itself, as well as the metaphorical road of their stripped down life.
The issue of death becomes quite important within the novel, and we are given a vivid account of the defining nature of this question. This happens when the father and the rarely seen mother of the son are arguing about death. While the father takes the stance that they should keep fighting and stay actively hopeful, the mother believes suicide is the best option because there is nothing to hope for, only things to hope against, such as rape and death at the hands of the various bands of Bad Guys who roam the countryside. In this conversation alone, McCarthy characterizes the father as having hope, refusing to leave this world without first trying to give his son what he deserves. This distinct right to life and subsequent right to hope of a better life is exhibited by the Good Guys. The mother selfishly chooses the comfort of death instead of keeping hope: “I should have [committed suicide] a long time ago…I’d take him with me if it weren’t for you” (McCarthy 56). The father, on the other hand realizes that, as one of the few moral beings left, he has a responsibility to correct moral action: “We’re survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp” (McCarthy 56). The flame in this case is representative of the small flame of humanity’s moral compass, which the father and son are carrying. While the mother sees death as an escape from this horrible world, the father sees death as something that will extinguish the flame that he and his son are carrying.
Sense of core individual identity is strong within the two travelers of The Road, two given group identities can also be found to inhabit the novel: Good Guys and Bad Guys. Through these two competing groups, the reader is able to see a clear division between given human values as perceived by McCarthy. On one hand, we see the amoral majority who has been reduced to using any means necessary to survive; on the other hand, we see the Father and Son together have clear moral boundaries which they refuse to cross.
While most of The Road contains very grim subject matter, the overall message The Road delivers is one of hope through the son’s ability to define himself merely through morality and human connection. He has been born into this wasteland and shows a way of thinking contrary to his father’s: that we should define ourselves only through the context of human connection.
One example of this extraordinary ability of the child’s is when, while traveling through a burned out city, the child thinks he sees another boy. When his father refuses to look for the boy, his son weeps for the lost child. This shows his ability to feel compassion for others in a world which clearly teaches its inhabitants to selfishly think of themselves first at all times.
The best example of the child’s compassion, however, lies in the event where he forces his father to stop for the night so they can feed Ely, a man who is certainly going to die and “”didn’t weigh a hundred pounds” (McCarthy 165). The boy feeds and allows the old man to stay the night with them, giving up precious food which they were running low on. We see extreme sacrifice from the boy, all in the name of compassion for other humans.
Whether it is compassionately feeding an old man who is surely bound for death or expressing the wish to befriend an elusive child, the son is constantly striving for true human connection. He certainly shows curiosity about the world and culture that was before him, and realizes the desolation of that world, but he seems predisposed towards defining his existence by goodness and a unique (in that world) compassion for others. The boy establishes this identity despite the total lack of material and cultural influence and is able to care about people, all the while grappling with the issue of his horrible condition and looming death at the hands of the Bad Guys. He is willing to risk it all for seemingly minor actions.
In the world of The Road, identity is a widespread, multi-faceted issue. It begs questions about identity in literature itself by giving many plausible examples of existing identity theory, and also begs the reader to empathize with the characters in the novel by reflecting on his or her own identity. This idea of identity is clearly important to the father, is naturally established by the son, and is something that is represented by many of the people in the story. Furthermore, this subtle emphasis on who we are and how we define ourselves as people must not be overlooked as one of the most important themes of this novel. Its exploration is useful in determining human predispositions towards identity as defined by Cormac McCarthy, and in exploring how we, the readers view our own building blocks of self-definition. McCarthy stresses the importance of morals to our identities, and in the end, our actions, moral or amoral, are all we have to truly identify ourselves and our humanity.
Works Cited
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory, A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Random House, 2006.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
Genesis II
Christopher Kinne
EN-270
Jeff Abernathy
Genesis II
“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” (Hebrews 11:13). The Road by Cormac McCarthy is paved with this sense of being a stranger and of being a pilgrim. Sometime after the catastrophe causing this post apocalyptic nuclear winter, the man finds himself a complete stranger in this world in which he grew and came to know so well. This is where the story of the pilgrimage in The Road begins. Without any place to call home and limited food supply, the man had to take this boy on a pilgrimage through this strange land. In this land, a land where society’s view was that the world was forsaken by God, the man had to insure the boy’s divine deliverance on this pilgrimage for a new creation.
Before the journey can be referred to as a divine pilgrimage for a new creation, the context of divine in The Road should be established. Divine is a slightly ambiguous statement in itself. What does divine mean in The Road, and where is the divine stemming from? Calling something divine could refer to that object being directly from a god or a supreme being, or divine could just mean that an object is spectacular or beautiful in a certain way. Specifically in the boy’s case, the boy is made divine because of the view of him we see through the father’s eyes. The most straight forward evidence that we have of this view in which the father holds is in a passage within The Road, “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 5). Also as we delve into McCarthy’s intent as to the real meaning of this story, we can see the urgency in which he introduces this postulate. McCarthy shows the audience that the father believes this after only four and a half pages hence anchoring this notion of the divine related to the boy for the rest of the story.
Now that the notion is introduced from the early thoughts of the father, the boy, at least in his eyes, carries the divine spirit if not more. Throughout the story there is evidence that might create a slight urge to call him a savior, but savior for what? During the man’s and the boy’s travels during The Road they meet a very decrepit looking man. This man is on the edge of death, and the man, as with most people, reacted with a severe mistrust and coldness. The boy, however, had the overpowering belief that they should help him. This would seem a strange decision within the framework of their situation because the man and the boy had just replenished their food supply for a short time, and they knew the food would probably run out and would starve before they could find more. The boy continues to persist, and eventually the father gave into the valor of the boy. At one point the father questions the boy. “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.” (McCarthy 259). “The one” is an interesting choice of words. The boy feels that he is the only one that is willing to help in this world, and if he is the only one that gives any attention to the caring and safety of the people in this world, that would make him, in a sense, the savior of this post-apocalypse. As savior implies this also gives another reason for the boy’s portrayal in a divine sense, and this pattern of concern for the survival of humanity continues to be a theme for the boy throughout The Road.
The boy’s role as a savior in the story can be related to Jesus’ role in the world with a minor difference. As mentioned before, the boy has a continuing concern for the survival of humanity. Jesus said, according the King James Version of the Bible, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). If taken in a literal sense in the boy’s case, society is dying off very quickly. The only hope for the survival of humanity is the youth of this world. Along with the boy’s concerns directly for others and that in order to continue humanity the boy must grow to reproduce, the boy is literally brining new life to this society in darkness every moment he is alive. This parallels Jesus’ mission to bring life to society as long as he existed. This is where the only difference comes into view. Jesus was brought into the world specifically to die while the boy is in this world specifically to live.
Even with a minor difference, there is still another strong similarity between the boy and Jesus. To understand the next direct relation between the boy and the Savior, the notion of darkness must be put in the context of The Road. Darkness according to the Oxford English dictionary can mean the absence of “light” meaning death. Also darkness can mean gloom of sorrow, trouble, or distress. Both of these definitions apply directly to The Road. In the second sentence of the book darkness is something immediately introduced. “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before” (McCarthy 1). Darkness is now introduced and the grayness in The Road can be read in a way that shows that even through all this darkness there is still some hope, but the hope is fading. With this reading the McCarthy’s statement then begs the question what is to be done? Jesus said, “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness” (John 10:46). Jesus came to save the world from this gloom and evil that had taken hold because he was the light. So another way Jesus and the boy can be directly related is through a continuing dialogue that the boy and the father have throughout the entire story. This is their conversations that drift to the notion of “carrying the fire”. McCarthy usually introduces these comments that the boy makes when the boy is afraid. “And nothing bad is going to happen to us. That’s right. Because we’re carrying the fire.” (McCarthy 83). The darkness of The Road begins to engulf the man and the boy from time to time, but the boy always realizes that they are carrying the fire. The darkness is then pushed away for the time being. After so many of these occurrences, of the darkness can be said that the boy is the fire and hence the light, and he is carrying this fire with him for the survival of humanity.
In a post-apocalyptic setting as is The Road, the divine from a social stand point is an object that is not easy to come by and or recognize. The survivors, if they did believe in God, would think that God has abandoned them, and if God has abandoned this world then in essence they are living in a world with no God. The boy and the father met a man in the story who refers to himself by the name of Ely, the same man the boy convinced his father to help. Ely is interesting in that McCarthy uses him to give some insight into the divine nature of the post-apocalyptic world. “There is no God. No? There is no God and we are his prophets” (McCarthy 170). This statement was immediately disregarded by the man in the story, but what Ely said does reaffirm that McCarthy wanted to portray that there is a missing belief of God or God is missing himself from this world. The conversation comes back to God later when Ely says that he thought that he had died because he saw a boy. The man then says of the boy to Ely, “What if I said that he’s a God?” Ely replies, “Where men can’t live gods fare no better” (McCarthy 172). This short dialogue shows again that the boy has a divine presence at the very least in his fathers world. This also, again, shows more evidence for this world with the missing God.
What happened to God in this society? Throughout recorded history there have been many different types of societies that have had many different economic and political arrangements. Whether they are of the Egalitarian, Hierarchical, or class-based flavor there has been one constant throughout history, religion or the belief of a higher power. Working from the previous claim that there is no God in this post-apocalyptic world, this claim seems to contradict the historical constant. Each society has had their own form of a God or higher power, and these beliefs change over time so the forced formation of this new society has done away with the old beliefs and requires the formation of something new.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is probably one of the most recognizable verses from the bible. God created the world from nothingness which seems to parallel the situation the boy and the man find themselves in The Road. According to the Bible God started in the nothingness and created the world we know. In The Road this world that God created is finished leaving a new form of nothingness and room for a new creation. The new creation that seems necessary in the story is the creation of a new society for the continuation of humanity. At the root of this creation is the idolization of youth but more specifically the boy. If the youth then is held up so high on this pedestal then some may start to worship the idea of youth and the continuation of society. Because of the worship of this idea, the boy is inevitably to be worshiped and made into the new God of this society.
Now that there is an established reason to view the boy as an object of the divine, the question can be answered of why? Why did the author intend the boy to be more than merely a boy, and what does this have to do with pilgrimage and the full creation story? Pilgrimage is the most easily recognized theme of this story. One only has to look at the title in an almost literal sense, The Road. This title implies that there is most likely a travel in this book, and indeed the boy and the man travel the entire story. That doesn’t quite make it a pilgrimage yet, however. The American Heritage Dictionary defines pilgrimage as “a long journey or search, especially one of exalted purpose or moral significance”. A pilgrimage can also be referred to as “a journey, esp. a long one, made to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion” (Dictionary.com).
The act of pilgrimage in The Road is actually a combination of the previous two definitions. As far as “a long journey of exalted purpose or moral significance”, we learn during the story of the man’s main purpose which is to keep the boy alive. This is straightforward enough. We can also say that the father feels almost a moral duty to keep the possibility of the survival of the human race alive. The father continues to make his son keep moving in hopes that arriving at the coast will solve or at least postpone death which he feels is always upon them. With the high hopes the father has for the coast, the idea can be seen as deliverance to paradise, a sacred place, which is where the journey or pilgrimage begins to shift to the idea of the divine. As mentioned before of the boy’s divine nature, the man’s devotion to him as a father could also be viewed as a religious devotion. We are then left with what was alluded to before. This pilgrimage is a journey originally to the coast which is made divine by the presence of the boy.
In the modern form of pilgrimage there are usually a few stops on the journey of holy or divine significance. During the father and son’s journey through The Road they come upon a fallout shelter. This shelter is not only a place where they can avoid the elements of this nuclear winter. This place is full of various non-perishable foods, hygienic items, and beds where they can rest warmly. This can be viewed as a utopia in the midst of this forsaken and dangerous land. Eden was the same. God gave Adam and Eve all they needed for survival in the Garden of Eden. The man and the boy had all they needed for survival in this shelter, but eventually they leave. Perhaps the man thought that they would be found there, but really the man was thinking about the coast which was originally their final destination on this pilgrimage. Even though they had all they needed, the man wanted more, and so the father and son labored on into the wilderness so was the fate of Adam and Eve. They had all they needed, but they wanted more and took the forbidden fruit. For this God punished them by forcing them to labor to survive. In this story of pilgrimage and creation in The Road McCarthy uses this shelter to remind the reader of the original story of creation which transforms this shelter into a divine stop on their pilgrimage to the coast.
What is left for this divine journey to be truly called a pilgrimage? For this pilgrimage in The Road evidence has been shown for the journey to be called divine. There is a destination in mind for the journey, and there is a stop of divine significance on the way. One piece that is missing, however, is an overarching divine reason to start this journey. Even though the boy in himself is enough divine reason for the journey, McCarthy uses the words of the father to directly convey this further. The father says at one point directly to the boy, “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God” (McCarthy 77). This is an interesting statement if the previous statement of a world with no God is taken into account. If also the boy can be considered the new God of this society, then he really was appointed by God. He was appointed subconsciously by the boy by the simple act of the boy being born into this world. The corollary of the last few statements is that the boy along with the youth of this society is truly the new religion of this world. Also the father’s statement relates directly to the previously mentioned definition of pilgrimage which is a direct act of religious devotion since the boy and youth can be called the new religion. So the divine parts are in place for this journey to be called a divine pilgrimage to the coast.
There is, however, a little snag in their pilgrimage which partially transforms this pilgrimage away from the original intention. As mentioned before, for a majority of this journey they where traveling for the coast but more importantly the idea of the coast. The coast was supposed to be their safe haven to start this new creation for humanity. Although as is learned in The Road idea of the coast becomes obliterated at the moment they arrive. The coast is as gray and consumed with darkness as the rest of the world. No warmth or light has carried over through the father’s idea of what the coast used to be. Even though the father has “the fire” with him to keep the darkness at bay, their pilgrimage to this new creation must be modified. The father decides to continue on with no real destination in mind, but as mentioned before, the father’s primary objective was to keep the boy alive for the continuation of humanity. So although there is no longer a destination, the idea behind the original pilgrimage, the boy’s divine survival, becomes stronger than ever and the primary focus.
How can the deliverance take place if there is no where to go? The father knows that if a place for the boy to grow is not found then the pilgrimage for a new creation will fail. The boy and the father continue on what would seem to be an aimless journey if not for the idea of deliverance. The man and the boy travel through a seemingly abandoned town where they are attacked. The man becomes injured and with what strength he has left he flees with the boy out of the town back to the wilderness. The darkness fully engulfs the man and the savior of this world is left to his own to “carry the fire”. As mentioned before, the boy is a savior of this world and related to a form of Jesus, and when Jesus was on earth miracles seemed to happen more often. If this boy is a savoir and like a God than he can’t just die in the nothingness. A miracle happens, however, when a man from the seemingly abandoned town followed them because of the divine presence of youth, the boy. This new man finds the boy in the darkness shortly after the father was consumed. McCarthy uses the dialogue between the boy and this new man to bring back the ideas introduced earlier in the story. “Are you carrying the fire? Am I what? Carrying the fire” (McCarthy 283). The new man ignores this at first then again the boy starts in, “So are you? What, carrying the fire? Yes. Yeah. We are” (McCarthy 283-4). McCarthy then reveals that this new man has children. The boy’s deliverance is now complete and the pilgrimage is complete.
Among the darkness and strange land, the man and the boy truly did complete a pilgrimage. McCarthy’s intent to show how a catastrophy or apocalypse can transform two very normal humans, a father and a son, into a divine presences brings about this meditation of society and pilgrimage. The man completed his mission from God to deliver the boy for the new creation. The light or “fire” of society has found a place at the end of this pilgrimage to flourish in society’s Godless world so that he may be a savior for humanity.
Works Cited
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006.
"Saviour." Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. Oxford University Press. 10 Nov. 2007
"Pilgrimage." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2004. 05 Nov. 2007.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pilgrimage>.
"Pilgrimage." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 05 Nov. 2007.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pilgrimage.
BibleGateway.Com. Gen. 1:1. 10 Nov. 2007
.
BibleGateway.Com. Heb. 11:13. 10 Nov. 2007
.
BibleGateway.Com. John 12:46.
.
BibleGateway.Com. John 10:10.
.
Works Referenced
Wood, James. "Getting to the End." The New Republic (2007): 44-48. Academic Search
Premier. EBSCO. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL], 15 Oct. 2007.
Egan, Jennifer. "Men At Work." Slate Magazine. 10 Oct. 2006. 15 Oct. 2007
Breslin, John B. “From These Ashes”. America 29 Jan. 2007: 27-28.
Coleman, Simon, and John Elsner. Pilgrimage. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP,
1995.
Morris, Colin, and Peter Roberts. Pilgrimage. United Kingdom: Cambridge UP, 2002.
EN-270
Jeff Abernathy
Genesis II
“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” (Hebrews 11:13). The Road by Cormac McCarthy is paved with this sense of being a stranger and of being a pilgrim. Sometime after the catastrophe causing this post apocalyptic nuclear winter, the man finds himself a complete stranger in this world in which he grew and came to know so well. This is where the story of the pilgrimage in The Road begins. Without any place to call home and limited food supply, the man had to take this boy on a pilgrimage through this strange land. In this land, a land where society’s view was that the world was forsaken by God, the man had to insure the boy’s divine deliverance on this pilgrimage for a new creation.
Before the journey can be referred to as a divine pilgrimage for a new creation, the context of divine in The Road should be established. Divine is a slightly ambiguous statement in itself. What does divine mean in The Road, and where is the divine stemming from? Calling something divine could refer to that object being directly from a god or a supreme being, or divine could just mean that an object is spectacular or beautiful in a certain way. Specifically in the boy’s case, the boy is made divine because of the view of him we see through the father’s eyes. The most straight forward evidence that we have of this view in which the father holds is in a passage within The Road, “If he is not the word of God God never spoke” (McCarthy 5). Also as we delve into McCarthy’s intent as to the real meaning of this story, we can see the urgency in which he introduces this postulate. McCarthy shows the audience that the father believes this after only four and a half pages hence anchoring this notion of the divine related to the boy for the rest of the story.
Now that the notion is introduced from the early thoughts of the father, the boy, at least in his eyes, carries the divine spirit if not more. Throughout the story there is evidence that might create a slight urge to call him a savior, but savior for what? During the man’s and the boy’s travels during The Road they meet a very decrepit looking man. This man is on the edge of death, and the man, as with most people, reacted with a severe mistrust and coldness. The boy, however, had the overpowering belief that they should help him. This would seem a strange decision within the framework of their situation because the man and the boy had just replenished their food supply for a short time, and they knew the food would probably run out and would starve before they could find more. The boy continues to persist, and eventually the father gave into the valor of the boy. At one point the father questions the boy. “You’re not the one who has to worry about everything. The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? he said. He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.” (McCarthy 259). “The one” is an interesting choice of words. The boy feels that he is the only one that is willing to help in this world, and if he is the only one that gives any attention to the caring and safety of the people in this world, that would make him, in a sense, the savior of this post-apocalypse. As savior implies this also gives another reason for the boy’s portrayal in a divine sense, and this pattern of concern for the survival of humanity continues to be a theme for the boy throughout The Road.
The boy’s role as a savior in the story can be related to Jesus’ role in the world with a minor difference. As mentioned before, the boy has a continuing concern for the survival of humanity. Jesus said, according the King James Version of the Bible, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). If taken in a literal sense in the boy’s case, society is dying off very quickly. The only hope for the survival of humanity is the youth of this world. Along with the boy’s concerns directly for others and that in order to continue humanity the boy must grow to reproduce, the boy is literally brining new life to this society in darkness every moment he is alive. This parallels Jesus’ mission to bring life to society as long as he existed. This is where the only difference comes into view. Jesus was brought into the world specifically to die while the boy is in this world specifically to live.
Even with a minor difference, there is still another strong similarity between the boy and Jesus. To understand the next direct relation between the boy and the Savior, the notion of darkness must be put in the context of The Road. Darkness according to the Oxford English dictionary can mean the absence of “light” meaning death. Also darkness can mean gloom of sorrow, trouble, or distress. Both of these definitions apply directly to The Road. In the second sentence of the book darkness is something immediately introduced. “Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before” (McCarthy 1). Darkness is now introduced and the grayness in The Road can be read in a way that shows that even through all this darkness there is still some hope, but the hope is fading. With this reading the McCarthy’s statement then begs the question what is to be done? Jesus said, “I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on me should not abide in darkness” (John 10:46). Jesus came to save the world from this gloom and evil that had taken hold because he was the light. So another way Jesus and the boy can be directly related is through a continuing dialogue that the boy and the father have throughout the entire story. This is their conversations that drift to the notion of “carrying the fire”. McCarthy usually introduces these comments that the boy makes when the boy is afraid. “And nothing bad is going to happen to us. That’s right. Because we’re carrying the fire.” (McCarthy 83). The darkness of The Road begins to engulf the man and the boy from time to time, but the boy always realizes that they are carrying the fire. The darkness is then pushed away for the time being. After so many of these occurrences, of the darkness can be said that the boy is the fire and hence the light, and he is carrying this fire with him for the survival of humanity.
In a post-apocalyptic setting as is The Road, the divine from a social stand point is an object that is not easy to come by and or recognize. The survivors, if they did believe in God, would think that God has abandoned them, and if God has abandoned this world then in essence they are living in a world with no God. The boy and the father met a man in the story who refers to himself by the name of Ely, the same man the boy convinced his father to help. Ely is interesting in that McCarthy uses him to give some insight into the divine nature of the post-apocalyptic world. “There is no God. No? There is no God and we are his prophets” (McCarthy 170). This statement was immediately disregarded by the man in the story, but what Ely said does reaffirm that McCarthy wanted to portray that there is a missing belief of God or God is missing himself from this world. The conversation comes back to God later when Ely says that he thought that he had died because he saw a boy. The man then says of the boy to Ely, “What if I said that he’s a God?” Ely replies, “Where men can’t live gods fare no better” (McCarthy 172). This short dialogue shows again that the boy has a divine presence at the very least in his fathers world. This also, again, shows more evidence for this world with the missing God.
What happened to God in this society? Throughout recorded history there have been many different types of societies that have had many different economic and political arrangements. Whether they are of the Egalitarian, Hierarchical, or class-based flavor there has been one constant throughout history, religion or the belief of a higher power. Working from the previous claim that there is no God in this post-apocalyptic world, this claim seems to contradict the historical constant. Each society has had their own form of a God or higher power, and these beliefs change over time so the forced formation of this new society has done away with the old beliefs and requires the formation of something new.
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). This is probably one of the most recognizable verses from the bible. God created the world from nothingness which seems to parallel the situation the boy and the man find themselves in The Road. According to the Bible God started in the nothingness and created the world we know. In The Road this world that God created is finished leaving a new form of nothingness and room for a new creation. The new creation that seems necessary in the story is the creation of a new society for the continuation of humanity. At the root of this creation is the idolization of youth but more specifically the boy. If the youth then is held up so high on this pedestal then some may start to worship the idea of youth and the continuation of society. Because of the worship of this idea, the boy is inevitably to be worshiped and made into the new God of this society.
Now that there is an established reason to view the boy as an object of the divine, the question can be answered of why? Why did the author intend the boy to be more than merely a boy, and what does this have to do with pilgrimage and the full creation story? Pilgrimage is the most easily recognized theme of this story. One only has to look at the title in an almost literal sense, The Road. This title implies that there is most likely a travel in this book, and indeed the boy and the man travel the entire story. That doesn’t quite make it a pilgrimage yet, however. The American Heritage Dictionary defines pilgrimage as “a long journey or search, especially one of exalted purpose or moral significance”. A pilgrimage can also be referred to as “a journey, esp. a long one, made to some sacred place as an act of religious devotion” (Dictionary.com).
The act of pilgrimage in The Road is actually a combination of the previous two definitions. As far as “a long journey of exalted purpose or moral significance”, we learn during the story of the man’s main purpose which is to keep the boy alive. This is straightforward enough. We can also say that the father feels almost a moral duty to keep the possibility of the survival of the human race alive. The father continues to make his son keep moving in hopes that arriving at the coast will solve or at least postpone death which he feels is always upon them. With the high hopes the father has for the coast, the idea can be seen as deliverance to paradise, a sacred place, which is where the journey or pilgrimage begins to shift to the idea of the divine. As mentioned before of the boy’s divine nature, the man’s devotion to him as a father could also be viewed as a religious devotion. We are then left with what was alluded to before. This pilgrimage is a journey originally to the coast which is made divine by the presence of the boy.
In the modern form of pilgrimage there are usually a few stops on the journey of holy or divine significance. During the father and son’s journey through The Road they come upon a fallout shelter. This shelter is not only a place where they can avoid the elements of this nuclear winter. This place is full of various non-perishable foods, hygienic items, and beds where they can rest warmly. This can be viewed as a utopia in the midst of this forsaken and dangerous land. Eden was the same. God gave Adam and Eve all they needed for survival in the Garden of Eden. The man and the boy had all they needed for survival in this shelter, but eventually they leave. Perhaps the man thought that they would be found there, but really the man was thinking about the coast which was originally their final destination on this pilgrimage. Even though they had all they needed, the man wanted more, and so the father and son labored on into the wilderness so was the fate of Adam and Eve. They had all they needed, but they wanted more and took the forbidden fruit. For this God punished them by forcing them to labor to survive. In this story of pilgrimage and creation in The Road McCarthy uses this shelter to remind the reader of the original story of creation which transforms this shelter into a divine stop on their pilgrimage to the coast.
What is left for this divine journey to be truly called a pilgrimage? For this pilgrimage in The Road evidence has been shown for the journey to be called divine. There is a destination in mind for the journey, and there is a stop of divine significance on the way. One piece that is missing, however, is an overarching divine reason to start this journey. Even though the boy in himself is enough divine reason for the journey, McCarthy uses the words of the father to directly convey this further. The father says at one point directly to the boy, “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God” (McCarthy 77). This is an interesting statement if the previous statement of a world with no God is taken into account. If also the boy can be considered the new God of this society, then he really was appointed by God. He was appointed subconsciously by the boy by the simple act of the boy being born into this world. The corollary of the last few statements is that the boy along with the youth of this society is truly the new religion of this world. Also the father’s statement relates directly to the previously mentioned definition of pilgrimage which is a direct act of religious devotion since the boy and youth can be called the new religion. So the divine parts are in place for this journey to be called a divine pilgrimage to the coast.
There is, however, a little snag in their pilgrimage which partially transforms this pilgrimage away from the original intention. As mentioned before, for a majority of this journey they where traveling for the coast but more importantly the idea of the coast. The coast was supposed to be their safe haven to start this new creation for humanity. Although as is learned in The Road idea of the coast becomes obliterated at the moment they arrive. The coast is as gray and consumed with darkness as the rest of the world. No warmth or light has carried over through the father’s idea of what the coast used to be. Even though the father has “the fire” with him to keep the darkness at bay, their pilgrimage to this new creation must be modified. The father decides to continue on with no real destination in mind, but as mentioned before, the father’s primary objective was to keep the boy alive for the continuation of humanity. So although there is no longer a destination, the idea behind the original pilgrimage, the boy’s divine survival, becomes stronger than ever and the primary focus.
How can the deliverance take place if there is no where to go? The father knows that if a place for the boy to grow is not found then the pilgrimage for a new creation will fail. The boy and the father continue on what would seem to be an aimless journey if not for the idea of deliverance. The man and the boy travel through a seemingly abandoned town where they are attacked. The man becomes injured and with what strength he has left he flees with the boy out of the town back to the wilderness. The darkness fully engulfs the man and the savior of this world is left to his own to “carry the fire”. As mentioned before, the boy is a savior of this world and related to a form of Jesus, and when Jesus was on earth miracles seemed to happen more often. If this boy is a savoir and like a God than he can’t just die in the nothingness. A miracle happens, however, when a man from the seemingly abandoned town followed them because of the divine presence of youth, the boy. This new man finds the boy in the darkness shortly after the father was consumed. McCarthy uses the dialogue between the boy and this new man to bring back the ideas introduced earlier in the story. “Are you carrying the fire? Am I what? Carrying the fire” (McCarthy 283). The new man ignores this at first then again the boy starts in, “So are you? What, carrying the fire? Yes. Yeah. We are” (McCarthy 283-4). McCarthy then reveals that this new man has children. The boy’s deliverance is now complete and the pilgrimage is complete.
Among the darkness and strange land, the man and the boy truly did complete a pilgrimage. McCarthy’s intent to show how a catastrophy or apocalypse can transform two very normal humans, a father and a son, into a divine presences brings about this meditation of society and pilgrimage. The man completed his mission from God to deliver the boy for the new creation. The light or “fire” of society has found a place at the end of this pilgrimage to flourish in society’s Godless world so that he may be a savior for humanity.
Works Cited
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006.
"Saviour." Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. Oxford University Press. 10 Nov. 2007
"Pilgrimage." The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton
Mifflin Company, 2004. 05 Nov. 2007.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pilgrimage>.
"Pilgrimage." Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. 05 Nov. 2007.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pilgrimage.
BibleGateway.Com. Gen. 1:1. 10 Nov. 2007
BibleGateway.Com. Heb. 11:13. 10 Nov. 2007
BibleGateway.Com. John 12:46.
BibleGateway.Com. John 10:10.
Works Referenced
Wood, James. "Getting to the End." The New Republic (2007): 44-48. Academic Search
Premier. EBSCO. [Augustana College], [Rock Island], [IL], 15 Oct. 2007.
Egan, Jennifer. "Men At Work." Slate Magazine. 10 Oct. 2006. 15 Oct. 2007
Breslin, John B. “From These Ashes”. America 29 Jan. 2007: 27-28.
Coleman, Simon, and John Elsner. Pilgrimage. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP,
1995.
Morris, Colin, and Peter Roberts. Pilgrimage. United Kingdom: Cambridge UP, 2002.
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"
Mark Baldwin
EN270
Dr. Jeff Abernathy
November 11, 2007
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
He, on the other hand, who really could participate in [the fortunes and sufferings of others] would have to despair of the values of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. -But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, Aphorism #33
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a grimly oracular account of human existence in the literal absence of culture and tradition. However, to call the book “existential” would be a academically specious maneuver. The novel certainly addresses some of the most profound mysteries of human existence: sacredness, death, good, evil. But in calling the book “existential”, one would be claiming either too much or too little. If one claims The Road is existential for addressing the riddles of human experience, how does that separate the novel from other great (or not so great) literature? Certainly Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited also addresses meaning, death, and the way we ought to live. Few would argue that all books that bear these themes are “existential”.
Or can one legitimately claim that The Road was written in allegiance with certain 20th century soi-disant existentialists (e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus)? Neither does such a claim wholly aid, for oftentimes the philosophical systems of even self-described existentialists can be entirely at odds with each other.
Furthermore, the extant criticism has scantly explored the connection between any of McCarthy’s books and “existentialist” thought. In her essay “De los herejes y hué rfanos: the sound and sense of Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction” in the critical anthology Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy, Linda Townley Woodson examines the semiotic and linguistic connections between Nietzsche and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (a subject of inquiry which I am not much concerned with here, but perhaps upon which I will elaborate in the final draft) (Woodson 201-208).
More relevant though, in that it addresses the moral and metaphysical underpinnings of McCarthy’s work, is J. Douglas Canfield’s essay “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy” in A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (256-269). This piece highlights the prophetic nature of characters in McCarthy’s trilogy by way of reference to existentialist works. Canfield, however, makes several puzzling moves, such as only briefly mentioning Nietzsche in connection with “the nihilists” and grouping Martin Heidegger with the theological existentialists (he openly denied that he was one). Canfield spends the bulk of the essay relating the Border trilogy to Camus, vis-à -vis Camus’ conception of human existence as absurd, which is a not altogether misguided project. However, Canfield also presciently cites a passage by Heidegger, which is as useful at striking at the character of McCarthy’s work as the passages by Nietzsche which I sight below. This disheartening observation appears in An Introduction to Metaphysics:
[These questions] still haunt us like a specter: What for?--Whither?--And what then?
The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline […], and appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with Kulturpessimismus, and of course nothing to do with any sort of optimism either; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long since been absurd. (Heidegger 38)
Although observations such as these do seem to reflect the sentiment of McCarthy‘s work, his famed reticence is certainly a hindrance in examining any certain allusions to such work: in his three or so interviews, he gives few clues as to where his literary and philosophical sympathies lie (NY times).
Nevertheless, the fact that The Road cannot be summarily described with one very loaded and often very ambiguous word (existentialism) does not prohibit one from exploring the thematic kinship between the book and oft-labeled existentialist works. In such an investigation, several topics especially lend themselves to fertile exposition and comparison: humanity’s loss of faith in traditional religion and a theistic god; morality in light of such a newly secularized world; the meaning of our existence (collectively and individually) in the face of such a world; and the phenomenon of death and our attitudes towards it.
McCarthy succeeds so soundly in confronting phenomena such as death and meaning in part because of his clear-eyed and unflinching narrative. The Road is a ruthlessly constructed artifice depicting a total wasteland: a literal wasteland in the text, but no less symbolic of the secularized industrial milieu into which humanity has increasingly confined itself for roughly the last two hundred years. Perhaps ultimate desolation has never been better realized: all life on Earth has been annihilated, save man. Thus McCarthy has torn away the “mask” of everyday, biological life, resolutely juxtaposing human beings with the lunatic void of the universe.
In this way the stage is set for the man in The Road to continually remark upon the atheistic characteristics of the new world in which he finds himself. Upon viewing the land about him at the opening of the book, he thinks “Barren. Silent. Godless” (4). Indeed, some of the only source of movement in the novel, the winds, are often characterized as “secular”. Lastly, during the man and boy’s encounter with the “prophet” Ely, a richly ambiguous exchange occurs:
How would you know if you were the last man on earth? [the man] said.
I dont guess you would know it. You’d just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.
I guess God would know. Is that it?
There is no God.
No?
There is no God and we are his prophets. (169-170)
At this point the man turns the conversation away from the absence of God and back toward how Ely has survived thus far. However, the conversation makes for fascinating comparison with remarks made by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche famously and quotably claimed “God is dead”, he intended more than a simple ontological declaration. Moreover, this segment is interesting for the similarity in tone between what Nietzsche claims follows from God’s death and McCarthy’s own prose. The aphorism is related as an allegory in which a “madman” confronts a stunned crowd:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him -- you and I! We are all his murderers. […] What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all direction? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? [The Gay Science 125]
Coldness, night, and void are certainly leitmotifs which recur throughout The Road. Yet compare here the remarkable similarity between Nietzsche’s language concerning the motion and quality of the earth with McCarthy’s:
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (130)
What kernels of truth can we extract from these two decidedly merciless passages? Both certainly emphasize the apparent isolation of both mankind and the individual. In our lives, we are thrown initially in media res, and we have no control over the initial circumstances in which we find ourselves. Both the man in The Road and Nietzsche’s madman are struck by the incoherence and fatal coldness of the newly secularized universe: “Darkness implacable”, “The crushing vacuum of the universe”, and “Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?”, “Isn’t night and more night coming again and again?”.Essential to McCarthy’s narrative exposition, however, is the tragic temporal nature of human beings. The faculties with which man can even apprehend the “ultimate truth” about the universe, its irrefutable nihilistic character, are “borrowed”: we must return them to our “benefactor” upon our dying. Thus it is that not even our sorrow at the universe is permanently ours.
Yet, even though both McCarthy and Nietzsche reject any comfortable traditional worldview (religious or scientific, for ultimately not even the laws of physics can combat the darkness implacable), neither thinker can be accused of straying further into moral nihilism.
For Nietzsche, belief in a theistic God, either by way of reason or faith had been fatally wounded by the collective intellectual transformation of the Enlightenment. What then, he demanded, were the consequences of the absence of God?
Firstly, he does claim that “objective” morality must necessarily follow God into obsolescence. “For there is no longer any ‘ought’; for morality, insofar as it was an ‘ought’, has been just as much annihilated by our mode of thinking as has religion” (Human, All Too Human 34). We must keep in mind, however, that although it is perhaps commonly perceived, moral nihilism was not at all Nietzsche’s aim or conclusion. Rather, he advocated that each individual compose his or her own values and be willing to be held accountable for them. “Knowledge qualifies [man at the highest stage of morality] to prefer the most useful, that is to say general and enduring utility, to personal utility, general and enduring honor and recognition to momentary honor and recognition: he lives and acts as a collective-individual” (Human, All Too Human 94).
And, certainly, this did not entail that one ought to do whatever one “felt” like doing. Instead, in the process of living authentically, what Nietzsche would call being a “free spirit” or “Ü bermensch” (alternately over-man, or less preferably, super-man), one would develop values which would be most likely harmonious with others. Indeed, it is partly through recognizing the mendacity of traditional moral systems, (e.g. Christianity, utilitarianism, etc.) and rejecting these systems that one becomes an authentic individual, a free-spirit.
Easily, one can see some initial similarities between the moral contemplations of Nietzsche and McCarthy’s narrator. Frequently, the man meditates upon not only the godlessness of the land in which he and the boy find themselves but also upon the privation of convenient moral doctrines. Indeed, the reductive materialism which the man continually confronts necessarily leads to negative statements such as these: “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledger book? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground” (McCarthy 196).
The man faces a constant uncertainty of how to act in “moral dilemmas”: whom to help, whom to punish, whom to forgive. In the absence of God, morality, and life, the man and boy look to each other for goodness and beauty, to the “fire” of humanity which they carry within themselves. They create their own sacredness: “He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct the ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (74).
In the final draft I shall address in roughly a page or two Heidegger claims about an authentic attitude towards death and the relation of such to death in The Road. Briefly, Heidegger proposes that one ought feel dread (Angst) in the face of one’s own death: “In Angst, Da-sein finds itself faced with the nothingness of the possible impossibility of its existence” (Being and Time 245). However, society, particularly Western culture for the last few hundred years, in the guise of das Man (“the other” or “the they”, i.e. the character of society, present in the majority of people, which “de-individualizes” the individual), constantly “tranquilizes” each individual about the fact of death. Das Man creates the feeling that death is something that happens at all times to “other people”, and thus is not relevant to me right now. However, Heidegger claims that death should be relevant to the individual at all times, for one, because it forces us to confront our own individual existence. Indeed, he claims that the being in dread of death is a necessary condition for living authentically.
The Road succeeds in making death relevant perhaps as few other books do. Death looms at each moment of the novel and is constantly present to mind for the man and the boy. Nevertheless, they live! It is the man’s care and concern for the boy, and the boy’s care and concern for strangers, that gives meaning to both of their lives. They really live, in a sense which few of us today could understand.
The aphorism at the beginning of this essay is one of many with which it is highly illuminating to view The Road: for is it not an all too vivid depiction of the apparent goallessness of man? But perhaps this goallessness is neither eternally nor universally true, perhaps it is simply the general character of our age. It may be that through books such as The Road, the individual acquires the wisdom necessary to recharacterize our age. Here, perhaps, as Heidegger foresaw, is that “last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline […], and appraise it as such”. Again, Nietzsche is useful in gaining insight into the topic at hand:
Times of darkness. - ‘Times of darkness’ is the expression in Norway for those times when the sun remains below the horizon the whole long: at these times the temperature falls slowly but continuously. - This is a nice simile for all thinkers for whom the sun of humanity’s future has for a time disappeared. (Human, All Too Human 191)
Certainly “the sun of humanity’s future” has gone below the horizon for quite a few in our age. But because The Road so authentically evokes the “fallen-ness“ of our age, the dreadful seriousness of each of our lives, we have gained the means to recognize our plight, which is of course the first step towards reorienting the course of our own lives and the course of mankind. And is that not part of the great power of the feeling evoked by the book, “a feeling beyond all other feelings”? Lastly, is McCarthy not triumphant in his ability to offer consolation in the face of this nightmare of nightmares, in his ability to offer a rebuttal to the squandering of the individual and humanity? The Road offers the only authentic consolation to the death of humanity or the death of the individual: resoluteness and unconditional love.
Works Cited
Canfield, J. Douglas. “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: the Border Trilogy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 256-269.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, SUNY Press: 1996.
---. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York, Yale UP: 1987.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York, Vintage Books: 2006.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 1996.
---. The Gay Science. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 2001.
Woodson, Linda Townley. “De los herejes y hué fanos: the sound and sense of Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction.” Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 201-208.
Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times. 19 April 1992. Accessed October 31
Works Consulted
Arnold, Edwin T. and Diane C. Luce. “Introduction.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 3-13.
Bell, Madison Smart. “A writer’s view of Cormac McCarthy.” Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Rick Wallach. New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 1-11.
Grossman, Lev. “A conversation between Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men.” Time. 18 October 2007. Accessed 01 November 2007.
Jaynes, Gregory. “The Knock at the Door.” Time. 06 June 1994. Accessed 03 November 2007.
Kennedy, William. “Left Behind.” New York Times. 08 October 2006.
Warner, Alan. “The road to hell.” The Guardian. 04 November 2006. Accessed 03 November 2007.
Whitmer, Benjamin. Rev. of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The Modern Word. 23 October 2006. Accessed October 14 2007.
Winfrey, Oprah. “Oprah’s Interview with Author Cormac McCarthy.” The Oprah Winfrey Show. Harpo Productions. Accessed 01 November 2007.
EN270
Dr. Jeff Abernathy
November 11, 2007
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
He, on the other hand, who really could participate in [the fortunes and sufferings of others] would have to despair of the values of life; if he succeeded in encompassing and feeling within himself the total consciousness of mankind he would collapse with a curse on existence - for mankind has as a whole no goal, and the individual man when he regards its total course cannot derive from it any support or comfort, but must be reduced to despair. If in all he does he has before him the ultimate goallessness of man, his actions acquire in his own eyes the character of useless squandering. But to feel thus squandered, not merely as an individual but as humanity as a whole, in the way we behold the individual fruits of nature squandered, is a feeling beyond all other feelings. -But who is capable of such a feeling? Certainly only a poet: and poets always know how to console themselves.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human, Aphorism #33
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is a grimly oracular account of human existence in the literal absence of culture and tradition. However, to call the book “existential” would be a academically specious maneuver. The novel certainly addresses some of the most profound mysteries of human existence: sacredness, death, good, evil. But in calling the book “existential”, one would be claiming either too much or too little. If one claims The Road is existential for addressing the riddles of human experience, how does that separate the novel from other great (or not so great) literature? Certainly Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited also addresses meaning, death, and the way we ought to live. Few would argue that all books that bear these themes are “existential”.
Or can one legitimately claim that The Road was written in allegiance with certain 20th century soi-disant existentialists (e.g. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus)? Neither does such a claim wholly aid, for oftentimes the philosophical systems of even self-described existentialists can be entirely at odds with each other.
Furthermore, the extant criticism has scantly explored the connection between any of McCarthy’s books and “existentialist” thought. In her essay “De los herejes y hué rfanos: the sound and sense of Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction” in the critical anthology Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy, Linda Townley Woodson examines the semiotic and linguistic connections between Nietzsche and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy (a subject of inquiry which I am not much concerned with here, but perhaps upon which I will elaborate in the final draft) (Woodson 201-208).
More relevant though, in that it addresses the moral and metaphysical underpinnings of McCarthy’s work, is J. Douglas Canfield’s essay “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy” in A Cormac McCarthy Companion: The Border Trilogy (256-269). This piece highlights the prophetic nature of characters in McCarthy’s trilogy by way of reference to existentialist works. Canfield, however, makes several puzzling moves, such as only briefly mentioning Nietzsche in connection with “the nihilists” and grouping Martin Heidegger with the theological existentialists (he openly denied that he was one). Canfield spends the bulk of the essay relating the Border trilogy to Camus, vis-à -vis Camus’ conception of human existence as absurd, which is a not altogether misguided project. However, Canfield also presciently cites a passage by Heidegger, which is as useful at striking at the character of McCarthy’s work as the passages by Nietzsche which I sight below. This disheartening observation appears in An Introduction to Metaphysics:
[These questions] still haunt us like a specter: What for?--Whither?--And what then?
The spiritual decline of the earth is so far advanced that the nations are in danger of losing the last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline […], and appraise it as such. This simple observation has nothing to do with Kulturpessimismus, and of course nothing to do with any sort of optimism either; for the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative, have assumed such proportions throughout earth that such childish categories as pessimism and optimism have long since been absurd. (Heidegger 38)
Although observations such as these do seem to reflect the sentiment of McCarthy‘s work, his famed reticence is certainly a hindrance in examining any certain allusions to such work: in his three or so interviews, he gives few clues as to where his literary and philosophical sympathies lie (NY times).
Nevertheless, the fact that The Road cannot be summarily described with one very loaded and often very ambiguous word (existentialism) does not prohibit one from exploring the thematic kinship between the book and oft-labeled existentialist works. In such an investigation, several topics especially lend themselves to fertile exposition and comparison: humanity’s loss of faith in traditional religion and a theistic god; morality in light of such a newly secularized world; the meaning of our existence (collectively and individually) in the face of such a world; and the phenomenon of death and our attitudes towards it.
McCarthy succeeds so soundly in confronting phenomena such as death and meaning in part because of his clear-eyed and unflinching narrative. The Road is a ruthlessly constructed artifice depicting a total wasteland: a literal wasteland in the text, but no less symbolic of the secularized industrial milieu into which humanity has increasingly confined itself for roughly the last two hundred years. Perhaps ultimate desolation has never been better realized: all life on Earth has been annihilated, save man. Thus McCarthy has torn away the “mask” of everyday, biological life, resolutely juxtaposing human beings with the lunatic void of the universe.
In this way the stage is set for the man in The Road to continually remark upon the atheistic characteristics of the new world in which he finds himself. Upon viewing the land about him at the opening of the book, he thinks “Barren. Silent. Godless” (4). Indeed, some of the only source of movement in the novel, the winds, are often characterized as “secular”. Lastly, during the man and boy’s encounter with the “prophet” Ely, a richly ambiguous exchange occurs:
How would you know if you were the last man on earth? [the man] said.
I dont guess you would know it. You’d just be it.
Nobody would know it.
It wouldnt make any difference. When you die it’s the same as if everybody else did too.
I guess God would know. Is that it?
There is no God.
No?
There is no God and we are his prophets. (169-170)
At this point the man turns the conversation away from the absence of God and back toward how Ely has survived thus far. However, the conversation makes for fascinating comparison with remarks made by the 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Although Nietzsche famously and quotably claimed “God is dead”, he intended more than a simple ontological declaration. Moreover, this segment is interesting for the similarity in tone between what Nietzsche claims follows from God’s death and McCarthy’s own prose. The aphorism is related as an allegory in which a “madman” confronts a stunned crowd:
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. ‘Where is God?’ he cried; ‘I’ll tell you! We have killed him -- you and I! We are all his murderers. […] What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all direction? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? [The Gay Science 125]
Coldness, night, and void are certainly leitmotifs which recur throughout The Road. Yet compare here the remarkable similarity between Nietzsche’s language concerning the motion and quality of the earth with McCarthy’s:
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it. (130)
What kernels of truth can we extract from these two decidedly merciless passages? Both certainly emphasize the apparent isolation of both mankind and the individual. In our lives, we are thrown initially in media res, and we have no control over the initial circumstances in which we find ourselves. Both the man in The Road and Nietzsche’s madman are struck by the incoherence and fatal coldness of the newly secularized universe: “Darkness implacable”, “The crushing vacuum of the universe”, and “Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing?”, “Isn’t night and more night coming again and again?”.Essential to McCarthy’s narrative exposition, however, is the tragic temporal nature of human beings. The faculties with which man can even apprehend the “ultimate truth” about the universe, its irrefutable nihilistic character, are “borrowed”: we must return them to our “benefactor” upon our dying. Thus it is that not even our sorrow at the universe is permanently ours.
Yet, even though both McCarthy and Nietzsche reject any comfortable traditional worldview (religious or scientific, for ultimately not even the laws of physics can combat the darkness implacable), neither thinker can be accused of straying further into moral nihilism.
For Nietzsche, belief in a theistic God, either by way of reason or faith had been fatally wounded by the collective intellectual transformation of the Enlightenment. What then, he demanded, were the consequences of the absence of God?
Firstly, he does claim that “objective” morality must necessarily follow God into obsolescence. “For there is no longer any ‘ought’; for morality, insofar as it was an ‘ought’, has been just as much annihilated by our mode of thinking as has religion” (Human, All Too Human 34). We must keep in mind, however, that although it is perhaps commonly perceived, moral nihilism was not at all Nietzsche’s aim or conclusion. Rather, he advocated that each individual compose his or her own values and be willing to be held accountable for them. “Knowledge qualifies [man at the highest stage of morality] to prefer the most useful, that is to say general and enduring utility, to personal utility, general and enduring honor and recognition to momentary honor and recognition: he lives and acts as a collective-individual” (Human, All Too Human 94).
And, certainly, this did not entail that one ought to do whatever one “felt” like doing. Instead, in the process of living authentically, what Nietzsche would call being a “free spirit” or “Ü bermensch” (alternately over-man, or less preferably, super-man), one would develop values which would be most likely harmonious with others. Indeed, it is partly through recognizing the mendacity of traditional moral systems, (e.g. Christianity, utilitarianism, etc.) and rejecting these systems that one becomes an authentic individual, a free-spirit.
Easily, one can see some initial similarities between the moral contemplations of Nietzsche and McCarthy’s narrator. Frequently, the man meditates upon not only the godlessness of the land in which he and the boy find themselves but also upon the privation of convenient moral doctrines. Indeed, the reductive materialism which the man continually confronts necessarily leads to negative statements such as these: “Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledger book? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground” (McCarthy 196).
The man faces a constant uncertainty of how to act in “moral dilemmas”: whom to help, whom to punish, whom to forgive. In the absence of God, morality, and life, the man and boy look to each other for goodness and beauty, to the “fire” of humanity which they carry within themselves. They create their own sacredness: “He kicked holes in the sand for the boy’s hips and shoulders where he would sleep and he sat holding him while he tousled his hair before the fire to dry it. All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you’ve nothing else construct the ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them” (74).
In the final draft I shall address in roughly a page or two Heidegger claims about an authentic attitude towards death and the relation of such to death in The Road. Briefly, Heidegger proposes that one ought feel dread (Angst) in the face of one’s own death: “In Angst, Da-sein finds itself faced with the nothingness of the possible impossibility of its existence” (Being and Time 245). However, society, particularly Western culture for the last few hundred years, in the guise of das Man (“the other” or “the they”, i.e. the character of society, present in the majority of people, which “de-individualizes” the individual), constantly “tranquilizes” each individual about the fact of death. Das Man creates the feeling that death is something that happens at all times to “other people”, and thus is not relevant to me right now. However, Heidegger claims that death should be relevant to the individual at all times, for one, because it forces us to confront our own individual existence. Indeed, he claims that the being in dread of death is a necessary condition for living authentically.
The Road succeeds in making death relevant perhaps as few other books do. Death looms at each moment of the novel and is constantly present to mind for the man and the boy. Nevertheless, they live! It is the man’s care and concern for the boy, and the boy’s care and concern for strangers, that gives meaning to both of their lives. They really live, in a sense which few of us today could understand.
The aphorism at the beginning of this essay is one of many with which it is highly illuminating to view The Road: for is it not an all too vivid depiction of the apparent goallessness of man? But perhaps this goallessness is neither eternally nor universally true, perhaps it is simply the general character of our age. It may be that through books such as The Road, the individual acquires the wisdom necessary to recharacterize our age. Here, perhaps, as Heidegger foresaw, is that “last bit of spiritual energy that makes it possible to see the decline […], and appraise it as such”. Again, Nietzsche is useful in gaining insight into the topic at hand:
Times of darkness. - ‘Times of darkness’ is the expression in Norway for those times when the sun remains below the horizon the whole long: at these times the temperature falls slowly but continuously. - This is a nice simile for all thinkers for whom the sun of humanity’s future has for a time disappeared. (Human, All Too Human 191)
Certainly “the sun of humanity’s future” has gone below the horizon for quite a few in our age. But because The Road so authentically evokes the “fallen-ness“ of our age, the dreadful seriousness of each of our lives, we have gained the means to recognize our plight, which is of course the first step towards reorienting the course of our own lives and the course of mankind. And is that not part of the great power of the feeling evoked by the book, “a feeling beyond all other feelings”? Lastly, is McCarthy not triumphant in his ability to offer consolation in the face of this nightmare of nightmares, in his ability to offer a rebuttal to the squandering of the individual and humanity? The Road offers the only authentic consolation to the death of humanity or the death of the individual: resoluteness and unconditional love.
Works Cited
Canfield, J. Douglas. “Crossing from the Wasteland into the Exotic in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.” A Cormac McCarthy Companion: the Border Trilogy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 256-269.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, SUNY Press: 1996.
---. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York, Yale UP: 1987.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York, Vintage Books: 2006.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 1996.
---. The Gay Science. Trans. Josefine Nauckhoff. Cambridge, Cambridge UP: 2001.
Woodson, Linda Townley. “De los herejes y hué fanos: the sound and sense of Cormac McCarthy’s border fiction.” Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 201-208.
Woodward, Richard B. “Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction.” New York Times. 19 April 1992. Accessed October 31
Works Consulted
Arnold, Edwin T. and Diane C. Luce. “Introduction.” Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Edwin T. Arnold and Diane C. Luce. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1993. 3-13.
Bell, Madison Smart. “A writer’s view of Cormac McCarthy.” Myth, legend, dust: Critical responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. by Rick Wallach. New York: Manchester UP, 2000. 1-11.
Grossman, Lev. “A conversation between Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers, about the new movie No Country for Old Men.” Time. 18 October 2007. Accessed 01 November 2007
Jaynes, Gregory. “The Knock at the Door.” Time. 06 June 1994. Accessed 03 November 2007
Kennedy, William. “Left Behind.” New York Times. 08 October 2006.
Warner, Alan. “The road to hell.” The Guardian. 04 November 2006. Accessed 03 November 2007
Whitmer, Benjamin. Rev. of The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The Modern Word. 23 October 2006. Accessed October 14 2007
Winfrey, Oprah. “Oprah’s Interview with Author Cormac McCarthy.” The Oprah Winfrey Show. Harpo Productions. Accessed 01 November 2007
Relationships and Hope in The Road
Kim Hernandez
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
2007.
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.
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
2007.
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.
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Publisher's Weekly take on reading The Road
Image from http://jonkeegan.com/illo.php?id=118 This illustration was for Publisher's Weekly Soapbox column. The author of the editorial described the joy of getting lost in Cormac McCarthy's apocolyptic tale "The Road", and how rare that kind of escape is in today's fiction landscape.
