The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is only one book in a series of recent novels to deal with a post-apocalyptic world. There is Jamestown by Matthew Sharpe, The Pesthouse by Jim Crace, as well as Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital. All four of these writers, it should be noted, are literary authors, writing outside the bounds of genre. Formerly, the apocalypse was the well-trod terrain of genre writers—especially of science-fiction, but also more recently of Christian writers. In the last year, though, it seems that some of our best writers are reclaiming this territory as viable grounds for works of art, not just entertainment flings or tools of indoctrination, and so the bookshelves are stocked with well-crafted versions of the apocalypse. But of all these recent end-of-the-world novels, The Road makes a strong bid for being the most important.

It won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, no mean task in itself, and that award was just the crowning achievement on top of many other accomplishments. The book was short-listed for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, many critics lauded the work as McCarthy’s masterpiece, and both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times put The Road on their list of best novels for the year. In the mildly self-satiric Tournament of Books, a literary variant of March Madness, The Road knocked off all the other books to emerge as the champion. And critically last but certainly not economically least, Oprah’s Book Club chose The Road as its recent selection, which gave the book a larger platform than many of McCarthy’s other awards combined.

The book’s wild success was unpredicted by book sales analysts, however, because of its dark subject matter. Not many post-apocalyptic stories are happy-go-lucky romps in the park, but then again, not many of them maintain such an unremittingly bleak view of the world that suicide seems like a good choice. McCarthy paints the world after a nuclear holocaust, where all the colors have run down into a uniform gray and where cannibalism is the order of the day. Nothing grows and few beings survive in this “cauterized terrain.” A father and a son are fighting for food and shelter, battling nomadic raiders who try to imprison and eat them, and hiking thousands of miles through the wasteland of the earth, under the ever-ashen sky. Before the father and son’s exodus began, we learn the mother used obsidian shards to slit her wrists.

This is not exactly endearing material to housewives in the Midwest.

The book shouldn’t repulse Christians, however. Not that it shouldn’t be repulsive in parts—because clearly the subject matter is not designed for children’s bedtime reading—but we should not avoid reading the book simply because of its dark subject matter. Although the content is not good fodder for imitation, it’s not content that determines the meaning and messages embedded in stories, but rather the interpretation of the elements inside the narrative—which acts are condemned by the story and which ones vindicated, which characters are punished for their deeds and which ones are rewarded. When judged in that light, The Road has much to recommend it. In fact, The Road, while not an explicitly a religious book, certainly aligns with religious belief.

First, consider the character of the son. In an otherwise ill-lit landscape, he is a beacon of hope and generosity. Though he and his father are starving, the son pleads with his father to offer a blind beggar some of their food. When they see a mangy dog, the son wants to take pity on it, and after seeing a little boy scampering about the rubble, he wants to take the boy under their wings for protection. The son’s default mode of operation is one of sympathy and grace. This is in sharp contrast to the father, who operates on the principle of pragmatics: he will do whatever it takes to survive. When they find a man wandering along the road, his eye fused shut after being struck by lightening, the son wants to offer him food but the father refuses: “He’s going to die. We cant share what we have or we’ll die too.” (And the lack of an apostrophe is not a mistake—much of the punctuation has been stripped from the text, especially for conjunctions, so the barrenness of the prose matches the barrenness of the world.) The father’s only sympathy is directed towards the son, but the son’s persistent example of unconditional love eventually wins over the father.

Also, by not naming the son, McCarthy manages to endow him with a mythic resonance, one that transcends mere individuality and rises to a symbol, or, perhaps, an allusion. On page two of the novel, the father links his son with the divine Son: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” The explicit references of the father to what the child represents dovetail nicely with the son’s actions of self-sacrificial love. Also, the allusions to the Word become flesh, as well as the spiritual echoes of the familial Son-Father construction, continue throughout the book. In fact, several reviewers have noted that the son is suspiciously Christ-like.

The book also emphasizes the evil embedded within humanity. One of the best defenses I have ever heard of the depravity of man was in an interview in the pages of a national magazine. The interviewer said he didn’t believe in depravity, because when he looked around he saw so many decent individuals, and the interviewee replied, “Haven’t you read Lord of the Flies?” It was a brilliant comeback, because while William Golding might not have ever uttered the word “depravity” in the novel, the characters he described in those pages are utterly convincing arguments for mankind’s innate tendencies toward evil. And while depravity can be rationally and logically argued until every syllogism is exhausted, nothing is quite as convincing as a story where men and women act as though truly wicked. In that quote above, The Road could easily be substituted for Lord of the Flies. The Road shows the suicidal and cannibalistic depths to which humanity can sink. Solipsism is everyone’s watchword. For most, survivalist notions that are inherently selfish are the only guiding principles of life. The son constantly inquires about “the bad guys,” and the father’s answers seem to imply that no one escapes this designation.

Yet depravity without moral characters is gratuitous. There are certainly many books that show depravity without holding back, and many of them would not be categorized as positive. But by consistently showing the sacrificial love from the father to the son, and from the son to everyone in the world, McCarthy makes his characters a glowing orb in a world where the lights have gone out, and redeems an otherwise gloomy novel. He is not as interested in the gratuity of sin as much as he is interested in focusing on the marvel of unconditional love in this hideous landscape.

To return to the concept of the apocalypse genre, the benefit of this type of story is that people become needy when they imagine such devastation. People start to search when they read a book that eviscerates their hope. People seek out answers when they feel that their overly simplistic or naive constructions of the world are faulty mechanisms to deal with pain. A type of book like this acts to deconstruct people’s flimsy (and ultimately hollow) explanations of meaning, purpose, and hope. Sure, he who has ears to hear will hear, but sometimes it helps to first have the earwax cleaned out by a penetrating work of art.

Given that The Road is coming at the same time as a spate of other apocalyptic novels, and only a few years after the hordes of books in the Left Behind series (the people most left behind were those trying to keep up with the sequels), it shows the massive interest people have in the end of the world. Perhaps people are just morbid and are titillated by thoughts of extinction, but the cultural fascination might also show a renewed interest in mortality, end points from which we cannot return, and a destruction of God-like proportions. This is a good thing; I’d much rather have people focus upon the end of the world than seducing the neighbor girl or trying to amass wealth. Apocalypse, in this case, could be a most healthy obsession.