Cormac McCarthy’s The Road: Not bleak enough for its own good

The Road is a book I liked and appreciated, with an ethos I did not like and appreciate.

Regardless of its various merits (and some faults), I think the book was at an exact level of bleakness where it undermined itself. It would have been fairly unremarkable if it was less bleak, and it would have been significantly better if it had not ended with a faint sense of hope.

I liked that the book was bleak and depressing. The narrative invited various interesting questions: Was the man's wife really wrong to kill herself? Is all the suffering and misery worth it for the nebulous hope of "carrying the fire?" Is life a good thing regardless of how terrible it is?

(And obviously, wondering these things about the story at hand also makes the reader think about it in terms of real life, whether the struggles are greater or lesser.)

With these questions on my mind, the implicit conclusion of McCarthy's actual ending seemed to be that that life should be preserved regardless of quality and that there's a great deal of nobility in suffering. If you persist long enough, something good will happen. This places the story in a category of (culturally) Christian philosophy that's repellent to me.

In my view, the circumstances encountered by the protagonists were so clearly awful that it was not worth it to carry on. The prospect of humanity persisting didn't seem particularly likely or desirable considering the suffering it demanded on the survivors. The wife made a great deal of sense to me. It would have been preferable if the man and boy had killed themselves rather than endure continuous starvation and horror. It would have been preferable if the thieves and beggars killed themselves rather than increase the deprivations of their fellows. It would have been preferable if the sex slaves and the livestock slaves of the wasteland had killed themselves to rob the cannibals of their sustenance. It would have been preferable if the cannibals themselves had killed themselves rather than commit atrocities. The principle is the same for all these parties, regardless of moral differences. The survival instinct is what caused the misery.

I realize that this is a radically utilitarian view, and that I shouldn't begrudge McCarthy for feeling differently about such things. Even so, I think the book would have been better if it had at least hedged its bets. The boy meeting a kind family of strangers (almost miraculously? is it the hand of God??) represents the author putting his finger on the scales and making his story less interesting with a clear verdict about its morality. From at least the mid-point on, I was sure that I would not appreciate a hopeful note at the end, because a theme of pessimism was appropriate to the story while even a slightly hopeful ending just creates a sense of backflow. A more ambiguous ending (with the boy left uncertainly alone perhaps) would have at least let the reader make up their own mind – something subtly different from having to either agree or disagree.