Though he sets his story in the nameless, gnashing future that might await America, McCarthy addresses the drama and the damage that confront our world today, while the levee is still holding. When I first read The Road three years ago, I wasn’t able to see through the alien landscape (of both the plot and the page). But upon examining it again, the psychology of apocalypse and its natural debunking is clear. I can recognize myself in both the father and the child: vulnerable, miserable, defiant, and strong.
“So, he whispered to the sleeping boy, I have you.” After the end of time (which stopped at 1:17, precisely, the day the son was born), it is only love that remains real. Our pair is indeed sustained by their meager rations of food and their animal instincts to fight or fly, but what keeps them going is the bond that goes beyond their bodies, for which death is no barrier.
The first half of The Road is the winter, and we can imagine the savior that is spring will follow, despite McCarthy’s landscape being as terse as his prose. The world character, where death advances on all fronts, is brutal and unforgiving; it is one of the many marauders from which we flee. But the novel is not about death, though it reigns over the land like the ashen daytime. It forces the reader down so far into the animalistic survival of our heroes that we peek out the other side, into the transcendent realm of miracle of that life can, has, and will exist: that we are staring into the page at that very moment, alive, intact, and sustained by love.
