The first time I finished The Road, I was on an airplane. The juxtaposition of my own surroundings and the solemn oppressiveness that McCarthy so eloquently presents in his novel were, at the time, quite disorienting. Mostly, the novel’s conclusion left me with an overbearing sense of grief that few works of literature are able to incite, but perhaps more significantly, I was also left with a distinct, lingering optimism. What is it about The Road that instills such dualism into my own psyche?
The second read through allowed me to understand the novel more fully, as the uncertainty I experienced about the boy and his father’s fate during my first experience with the novel was not present. I knew the outcome of the pair’s struggles, and interestingly, I found that McCarthy’s damning condemnation of the world as we know it was perhaps less apparent as I finished the novel a second time. The Road comes across as an incredibly dark portrait of humanity, but it lacks the cynicism that so many other contemporary depictions of the apocalypse use as their crutch.
The Road possesses a sense of earnesty isn’t immediately apparent, largely due to its weighty and oppressive tone that can come across as entirely devoid of hope. McCarthy’s creation is a deft blend of layered bleakness and fleeting, disparate moments of profoundly optimistic human interaction. McCarthy’s depiction of the father/son dynamic is most readily apparent, but the reader can easily glean a larger, more complex web of relationships that give a deeper insight into the human element in the novel’s apocalypse.
A dream sequence towards the story’s close provides a familiarly desperate view of the protagonist’s fading life – “Old dreams encroached upon the waking world. The dripping was in the cave. The light was a candle which the boy bore in a ringstick of beaten copper. The wax spattered on the stones. Tracks of unknown creatures in the mortified loess. In that cold corridor they had reached the point of no return which was measured from the first solely by the light they carried with them.”, p. 280. The passage is in many ways refuted by the book’s conclusion – for at the end, McCarthy imbues a residual, lingering, glimmering hope. The boy, alone in the world without his father, is a walking shadow of the world as we know it, but he encounters people who might also be “carrying the fire,” as his father once said.
On page 286, when the boy is introduced to the female companion of the stranger that takes him in, God is repeated as a recurring element. “She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man thorough all of time.” This is a perplexing yet poignant statement for me, as it seems to reject the need for formal religion and embrace it all at once, in a vaguely (but intentionally) illiterate manner.
I think part of the reason I enjoy The Road so completely, on multiple levels, is owed to McCarthy’s writing. His illumination of human suffering isn’t pandering, pretentious, or navel-gazing, nor is it damning or judgemental. Like most successful apocalyptic fiction, in literature, film, and other media, The Road is a text that elaborates and doesn’t exploit the myth. As a construct that is innately powerful across multiple cultures, and particularly ours, the apocalypse myth is not one that should be treated carelessly. McCarthy consciously chose the world of The Road to be post-apocalyptic, and his choice is a reflection on the concept’s volatile nature.
Increasingly, the apocalypse is the brunt of many exploitive endeavors – Hollywood, for one, has commandeered the myth and reduced it to explosions and overstuffed CGI spectacle – and The Road’s enduring atmospheric treatment of the subject is refreshing, if not entirely uplifting.
But the first time I read through the novel’s conclusion, in the airplane, I almost burst into tears. Very few books or movies ever make me tear up, but as a read through the father’s passing, I couldn’t help but notice my eyes watering profusely. It is a powerful novel – one that strikes in subsiding waves of monochromatic imagery and resonating portrayals of humanity. It is a novel that captures the zeitgeist by avoiding it entirely and ultimately, McCarthy’s treatment of the apocalypse is no less than visionary.
