My thoughts on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

I feel conflicted about this 2007 Pulitzer Prize winning book, which I read in a single sitting in one evening. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the critics who found it frustrating, bleak, and depressing. There's not a lot of plot. It gets dark at times, exceedingly and painfully dark. The author has stripped down the punctuation to remove all quotation marks and most references to who is speaking, and this just makes it harder to read, and at times even to identify the person being described.

But the further I read, this grew on me. The sparse style captures something of the devastated landscape. And yes, it is bleak, but that's partly the point of the apocalyptic setting. We have two characters who have even lost their names, and all that really matters is their relationship: father and son. But they haven't lost their humanity. It's a horrible world in which they find themselves, and at times it makes for painful reading. We see humanity at its worst and most depraved, as desperate survivors are prepared to kill and eat each other. Horrific scenes with captives being kept for food in a basement, and the charred body of an infant being roasted over a fire are not easily forgotten.

Yet there is a sense of hope. On multiple occasions where the man and the boy are on the verge of death, they stumble across supplies and food. And even though the boy is filled with a constant sense of terror, the man constantly works to keep his son's hopes up, even in the worst case scenario. He divides surviving humanity into two types: “the bad guys” and “the good guys”. They embody the good, because despite how desperate they are, he insists they will never resort to cannibalism, or even to killing a dog. “We would never eat anybody… even if we’re starving… no matter what… because we’re the good guys.”

And when coming across other unfortunates, the boy wants to share their resources and help others, even if they can't afford to. Perhaps this is what the author means by the "fire they are carrying". Even in a hopeless world filled with depravity, there is still a flame within humanity that shows that human compassion and hope is never entirely lost. The boy embodies this spirit, and is committed to ethics like honesty and kindness even in impossible circumstances. A little boy he sees, whether real or imagined, becomes a device to show his compassion for others: “I’m afraid for him … we could take him with us, we could take the dog too … I’d give that little boy half of my food.”

The ending is somewhat ambiguous and haunting, and left me with a lot of questions. Some interpret it pessimistically, concluding that the man offering to adopt the boy into his family is just a liar and a cannibal; or that this whole episode is just an imagined dream in the mind of the boy or his father. But there is internal evidence that supports a more positive explanation. For instance, the presence of other children with the boy's new protector seems to be evidence that they are part of the "good" who share the values of his father. There is a real sense in which the torch is being passed from father to son. So despite an overwhelming sense of loss, there's also a new note of hope. McCarthy was raised as an Irish Catholic, and although he describes himself as not particularly religious, after lapsing from the faith following his high school years, it’s plausible to ascribe this redemptive note to the influence of his Catholic upbringing and his familiarity with religious themes of Christianity.

The final paragraph, on the other hand, caught me off-guard and seems enigmatic. Beginning with the sentence “Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains”, perhaps it is just a lament for what has been lost and won’t return, and is a cautionary warning against the impact and consequences of human involvement in the world, especially on nature.

Besides a film, a graphic novel version of the book has been produced. At times the graphic novel can be a bit hard to follow – at least on its own – and you really need to have read the full novel first to make sense of it. But it really captures the stark bleak world in black and white quite well. It also follows the text of the novel closely, and I found it helpful to read after reading the novel first.

I admire what McCarthy has achieved with The Road, even if I didn't always enjoy it, and didn't always understand his methods. This could have been a gripping adventure story where a lot more happened, and maybe then I would have enjoyed it more – but then it probably would have been just one of so many other good apocalyptic stories, and wouldn't have won the Pulitzer Prize.