The Road

I’m reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road right now and my heart is heavy under the tremendous weight of it. I’m reading the novel for the second time and for the moment I think it might be my favorite novel. I will probably change my mind on that at some point, but for the moment I’m utterly immersed in the world McCarthy’s has created. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel and I believe it was justly earned. His prose is lyrical, haunting and breathtakingly beautiful; it really sticks with you.

The novel is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are slowly becoming extinct. A father and son set out on a journey along what used to be an Interstate highway, but is simply known as “a road” since there is no such thing as states anymore. The duo’s journey south is out of necessity as the region they formerly inhabited is increasingly becoming too cold to sustain their existence, and like other great stories of migration, the journey gives the father a quest (he must deliver his son safely to the coast) as well as hope for the child (that he may find a better life in the south with food and other children to play with). But the landscape is bleak and desolate and though the child must have faith and hope, the reader, like the father, is constantly aware of the direness of their circumstances and the reality that their hope may be in vain. Literally all the two have to keep them going is clinging unflinchingly to the love they share.

The story evokes primal emotions and beliefs about what it means to exist and be human. The father and son have to decide what it means to choose good or evil and are forced to reinvent its parameters in a world stripped of human civilization. A world where some have reduced everything down to one axiom: survival. In this world where survival is uncertain and the fragileness of existence an incessant reality, theft, plunder, slavery and cannibalism are viable options for many and their merits the only means of subsistence. The ethics of this world are extraordinarily troubling to our sensibilities, but not outside the realm of possibility given the circumstances, which makes the territory McCarthy navigates resonate with disturbingly profound insight and tension.

The story also ponders the existence of God. The father cannot accept belief in God because of the terrible loss he has experienced, but at the same time the father clings firmly to his notion of what distinguishes good from evil and resists the temptation to choose evil. The father also admires what he sees as pure beauty and goodness in his son, and he cannot fathom where this beauty and goodness comes from or how his boy is capable of feeling and choosing it in the face of overwhelming atrocity. McCarthy captures the conflict at war in the core of the human soul: the paradoxical coexistence of good and evil and the fragile hope that pursing good will not be in vain, that at some point there will be a redemption of sorts—whether from divine intervention or from the eventual triumph of the good in the human spirit is unknown—but that in whatever form it takes, it will realign the universe and prove the endeavor of human existence had some sort of purpose beyond biological survival and the cold mechanical turning of the planetary system. Though for the moment this may be all we seem to have.