Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Redemption through Defiance
Sunday, 2 May 2010
In Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the horror and torment of an apocalyptic world comes in the form of good guys and bad guys. What deciphers good from bad is whether or not one’s spirit and mind remain clear and defiant enough to resist the acutely strong temptation, amidst starvation, to devour one’s own offspring.
You may not like the road the father and son travel, you may not want to believe we are headed toward a world, a landscape, so patently wasted that no birds or trees (or many human beings, for that matter) have survived; but in the face of the cruel curse of starvation and destruction, a world of ashes the novelist vividly describes, the father and son tenaciously cling to the higher ideal of “good guys” even as they travel this road to nowhere.
How does one abstain from dismissing a high ideal in the face of doom? Or better posed, why not discard ideals altogether when on the lonely road of a desolate wasteland no one is keeping track anyway?
We observe the boy’s father succumb to disease, nakedness and starvation and understand that he defies delusion to the end; the delusion is that he should assuage his hunger by any means necessary. The instinct to fend off starvation is very real. The methodical plodding of father and son is strictly dedicated to the task of finding anything edible.
Fiction gets the best of reality every time and neither the world, the road traveled nor ideas of faith cumulatively could give a pinch. With superb insight, McCarthy engages us with the father’s logic in his efforts to ward off delusion and death and to continue to protect the boy from harm’s way.
The novel’s redemptive conclusion comes in the form of a defiant challenge: under no circumstances do we resort to cannibalism.
The author’s talent is bestowed upon us throughout; as an example of the brevity and beauty, he describes one of the father’s nightmares on the road, envisioning the horror of tortuous destruction of serpentine-like beings innocently resting in the bowels of the cool earth:
“The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be.”
The reader travels the road with father and son and observes the waste, the atrocious brutality, but is sternly reminded that simple survival of the fittest instincts to create, to destroy, become obscured. Our ignorance produces boredom, and with boredom: evil and violence.
Though not overtly stated, this is the setting and time period for McCarthy’s story: The Road.
“Do you think that your fathers are watching?”
“That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what?
“There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.”
One is reminded of the ending to the Sam Shepard play Curse of the Starving Class, the image of a cat that latches on as an eagle takes flight; an instinctive fight to the death.
Similarly, Raymond Carver, from his poem, The Author of Her Misfortune cautioned:
Over the long course/
everything but hope lets you go, then/
even that loosens its grip.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy: Highly recommended.
