Doomsday

One of the realizations that came to me as I read Cormac McCarthy’s The  Road was that life is far more precious if you had to fight for it. Every sacrifice you make to accomplish something means that the worth of that sacrifice goes into that accomplishment. To have to fight everyday for survival, to be hunted, hungry and cold everyday either breaks one spirit or tempers it into steel.

Another thing that caught my attention was how the father kept telling his son that they were the “good guys.” The son’s uncertainty shines through in that he is not secure in the knowledge that the measures his father took to survive were not unquestioningly moral. To a great extent, this moral ambiguity is justified. That they left the slaves that they found to the cannibals rather than setting them free comes to mind as an example. However, the practicality of these actions cannot be questioned. Everything the father did, was for his own and son’s survival. In a dystopia where everyone is in imminent threat of being eaten by other people, your own survival becomes far more important than anyone else’s.

This brings me to the subject of cannibals. While I have heard accounts of cannibalism when people are in desperate straits, somehow desperation does not seem quite extreme enough to justify the idea of cannibalism. Seriously, you are eating other people! That’s a terrifying idea to contemplate—eating people or being chopped up and eaten by other people. I can’t wait for this book to be over.