A man and his son walk along a road in the midst of ash-covered desolation. That is the central image of Cormac McCarthy’s wonderfully haunting novel The Road, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. McCarthy creates a post-apocalyptic world in which the majority of humanity and nearly all animal and plant life have been destroyed. The Sun and Moon are nearly always obstructed or at least dimmed by dust in the air. When snow falls, it is gray. Clocks froze at 1:17. McCarthy never tells readers what caused the destruction, but because of the lack of vegetation and abundance of ash, we can guess that something like a nuclear holocaust happened. The worst horrors of the story do not come from trying to piece together the annihilation, but the image of life left in its wake. Governments have fallen and roaming gangs of cannibals rule the roads. The man and the boy — we never learn their names beyond those titles — consider themselves “the good guys” because they do not resort to the evil actions of the gangs. This tiny family are the carriers of the fire.
Because of the immediacy of the characters’ situation, much of the narrative focuses on their conscious actions. They search abandoned houses for cans of food, build fires, seek shelter and improvise shoes in order to stay dry over snowy mountain passes. They hide from the gangs. The characters do not have much space to pontificate or engage in philosophical discussions. The boy was too young when the cataclysm occurred to remember the world prior to this desolation. The man understands that what was the past is almost entirely lost. All he has is a future and that is his son. They are, “each the other’s world entire.”
McCarthy’s beautiful prose comprising quiet and short sentences draws the reader into this nightmare of a world. The prose-poetry does at times resemble dream narratives, but like the man and boy, the only dreams one has in a world such as this are nightmares. McCarthy’s genius lies in his ability to find glimmers of hope in the midst of the terror. These hopeful moments do not come across as a second thought of the author, as if he realized he painted a picture too bleak and felt like he needed to cheer things up to make the story more palatable. When the boy asks his father, “What are our long term goals?” we see that for the man, the hope for his world is in the love of his son, who, like all sons, will one day have to go into the future without his father. And because this novel works as a parable, we also understand that this is a question to us.
The Road was the first McCarthy novel I’ve read. In fact I first encountered McCarthy last year when I saw Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant film adaptation of McCarthy’s earlier novel, No Country for Old Men. I cannot wait to read more.
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