It is a simple story, of a father and young son traveling through an apocalyptic world, nuclear winter causing constant cold, brief, gray days, and ash falling constantly from the sky. The lawless landscape seemingly empty except for the unnamed pair and roving packs of predatory cannibal cults.
It is a nightmare world.
Stripping the apocalypse of any romanticism, McCarthy crafts a world where the living rightfully envy the dead, where “survivors” cling to this world while craving the chance to leave it. Where the afterlife is not envisioned as heaven except for the hope of eternal nothingness.
The father is resilient and resourceful, his only remaining purpose the survival of the boy, who was in the womb when the bombs fell. The mother and wife disappeared one day years past, sure that death by own her hand and volition would be better than the inevitable death at the hands of the fearsome gangs who litter the landscape with bodies and keep cellars full of half-eaten, half-alive victims.
Did I mention that it is a nightmare world?
At first, set against this imagery, the father and son seem to be translucent elements of the landscape. They are as dirty as the ash-covered ground, as hungry as the long-since ransacked grocery stores, as empty as the forests of dead trees.
But, as their relentless drive carries them through days of starvation, frozen nights, and dangerous encounters, something beautiful is seen. And this is a new form of beauty, a shape only McCarthy could craft. Because there is no grace, no art. There is merely life and love.
Where many have forsaken life, these two persist, though they do so at their own peril. For, while their life means cautiously approaching seemingly abandoned houses, hoping to find a few missed morsels of food, not knowing what evil might already have taken up residence, it also means the boy swimming in the ocean, the father contentedly watching.
They persist because of love, love without blindness or idealism. While every single other human or subhuman that is encountered in the story is concerned solely with their own survival, only banding together for selfish reasons, the boy and his father are together out of love, something revealed as raw and primal as hunger or cold.
I’m going to reveal much about the ending here, because the point of the story is revealed in just the last couple pages. So either get the book at this point and come back and read this later, or be okay with my thoughts rattling around in your head if you ever do read it.
The book ends very abruptly. After reaching the seashore, the destination throughout the book though it is never articulated why, the father dies. We had seen it coming: every night, he crouched in the gray snow at the edge of the firelight, coughing blood. Having found no salvation at the sea, they no more than turn back inland than he literally lays down and dies.
The boy is nearly broken by the loss of his father, his “world entire,” but after a few days of mourning we see him exhibiting his father’s resourcefulness; unshackled by dependency, he becomes capable. And then, he is taken in by “good guys,” defined as such for no other reason than that they don’t eat people. Though the concept of them was discussed frequently by the boy and his father, we never knew if there’s any point in hoping that there are still some out there.
I saw elsewhere someone say that the ending felt too abrupt, and it did to me at first, as well. But then I realized it all made sense. The father and son had accomplished the one small goal they shared: reaching the sea alive and together. It was a goal shared with the reader, though we understood why even less than the father, who drove them on and on toward it, did.
It also seemed that the “good guys” who plucked up the boy after his father’s death were only doing so because the father, a ruthless protector of his son’s life, was finally gone. It was now safe for them to approach, to welcome him into their small corner of humanity. Which is exactly what the father would have hoped for. If he had still let himself hope for anything.
[tags]cormac mccarthy, fiction, books[/tags]
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- Cormac McCarthy, 2005
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One Comment
I just finished The Road today and had to search for some other humanity out there that had read it. I was haunted by this book. For me it was a page by page brutal experience. One that I am glad I endured.
Having a 2 year old son transformed the whole experience. The loving bond touched me so deeply.
The look into the future of our nuclear world made the whole sceneario seem so possible.
You mention in your last paragraph about what the father would hope for, if anything. At first I thought that it is in our makeup as animals to keep going though there is little hope. But that was contrasted so well with the suicide of the mother. The contradictions of human life were so abundant: the good guys vs the bad guys, choosing life vs eating each other, the elements at the same time allowing them to continue but just barely.
In the end I look at what endures: Love, the earth and God.