I read The Road initially sometime after it came out in paperback, in 2007, maybe? It knocked me over and has stayed with me. I heard the book referenced in some podcast I was listening to and decided it was time to re-read it.
This is just me
yammering about the book, so I’m assuming that you’ve read it too. If not, you’re going to find a ton of spoilers
ahead, so if I were you, I’d go read it for myself first.
Jesus, this novel
is amazing. I love everything about it: the writing, the characters, the world,
the story, the subject, the pacing, the tone—it’s all gripping and stunningly
beautiful and horrifying. This novel
walks the seemingly impossible line between minimalism and richness.
Let’s start with
the structure, at the level of sentences on up.
The syntax is predominantly simple.
Often subordinate clauses are just made into a freestanding sentence
fragment, as though the narrator was too winded to put it all into one sentence
or too malnourished to think more complexly.
If you’ve read Blood Meridian, you know that McCarthy is skilled in
the construction of a beautifully complex sentence. The book has frequent section breaks but no
chapter breaks. The latter feature makes
all the bits and fragments flow together like the calendarless days of the
protagonists. The former feature gives
us the experiences in small chunks.
While this serves the obvious function of letting us jump between the
dreary sameness of days in the post-apocalypse, it also creates the effect of
fading in and out, missing time.
Sometimes only seconds pass between sections. Sometimes whole months. Sometimes
we get a flashback. Time within those
section breaks is elastic and mysterious, and we readers never know where we
are going to land.
I also love that
the dialogue is without quotation marks, stripped down to these short exchanges
that can be said in single breaths. This
is a world without the finery or such things as quotation marks or fancy adjectives
and verbs telling us how the words were said.
Everything is presented in flat, grey tones like the ashes they lie
in. This presentation also comes with a great
sense of vulnerability. They only speak
when necessary, and the exchanges are painfully tender or desperate, declarations
of fear or assurances that there is no danger.
Then there are the repeated phrases, such as “I know” and “okay.” In another book, these little words feel like
filler, without weight or aftertaste.
Here, they are laden with emotions that can’t be spoken out loud, hit-and-miss
efforts between the boy and the man to connect.
The boy and the
man, our two protagonists, make this book simultaneously a coming-of-age story
and a coming-to-death story, and they get at the heart of what The Road
is about. The Road is one of the
bleakest books I’ve ever read or could ever imagine. In many post-apocalyptic narratives, the
protagonists are heading to some rumored or dreamed of safe haven where society
can possibly rebuild itself. Here, there
is no hope of that. Every day is a
struggle for survival, but as you look down the titular road, there is no
possible safe haven, no place where the sun is not obscured by ash, no hope
that green grass will grow anew in time to revitalize the food web that has been
laid to waste by the unnamed ecological disaster. Death, either by other humans or lack of
resources, is inevitable at whatever scale you choose. At the heart of the novel, then, is what are
we living for? I imagine that in our
answering that question, the book can serve as a kind of Rorschach test, as we
each bring our own current views about life to the book.
The man’s wife doesn’t
see a reason to go on, and we get that confrontation early in the book. The man
declares that they are survivors, to which she responds “What in God’s name are
you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film”
(55). She says that her “heart was
ripped out of me the night he was born” (57), presumably because his life made
living necessary, and his life was necessary to live. As she says to the man. “The one thing I can tell
you is that you won’t survive for yourself. I know because I would never have
come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together
some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of
love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body”
(57). Without something to fight for, to
defend, to take a stand for. For the
man, that’s the boy, of course. But even
the boy needs something to live for. The
boy expresses the desire to die several times in the novel, but he is given two
things to live for: first, his father, and second, the “fire” they “carry”
(83).
That fire is obviously
the symbol of hope and rebirth, the promise of a new civilization, or the goodness
in humanity. In the morality play of his
father’s telling, they are the “good guys,” looking for other “good guys” and
avoiding the “bad guys.” The tension between
the man and the boy grows as that cosmology crumbles in the face of lived
reality. Seeing his father kill one man,
leave a seemingly-abandoned boy behind, steal from a camp, resist feeding and
warming an old man on the side of the road, and finally leaving another old man
naked and without possessions in the middle of the road, the boy cannot resolve
the tension between the stories he’s been told and the actions he’s witnessed. He
sees his father,s failure as a betrayal of the fire they carry, but instead of disbelieving
the tales he’s been told, he concludes that the preservation of the fire is entirely
up to him. After they leave the old man
naked and alone, the man tries to explain his actions, saying “You’re not the
one who has to worry about everything,” to which the boy responds, crying, “Yes
I am. . . . I am the one.”
The father’s plan,
all along, is to kill himself and the boy should the get into an inescapable
danger. If the boy dies, then he plans
to kill himself, having no reason to go on.
In both cases, he wonders at different times, does he have the will to
do it. It’s a beautiful and painful
question, and it gets right to the question of what we are living for. To stop living takes more determination than
living. We are wired to survive, the try to find someway to carry on. Is it strength in him to soldier on with his
son day after day, or is it weakness, exposing his son to danger and misery for
the sake of seeing another day? We will
never know what he would have done had the boy’s sickness had claimed him, but
we do know that, in the end, he was unable to have his son die with him. He left his son alone with a few directions,
a few belongings, and not nearly enough training. Very likely, the boy could have met the same
fate as the man left naked at gunpoint. We
see him do nothing in an effort to survive.
We feel how lost and heartbroken he is.
But someone stops for him as his father did not stop for that other boy.
And what does
that ending mean? How do we interpret
it? What questions does it settle?
I don’t know. It gives
the sense of hope, but that seems like a false sense to me. We must ignore everything else we know about the
world in order to interpret it hopefully, and the book gives us every opportunity
to do so. The book ends so quickly after the boy connects with this other family,
that it doesn’t let us dwell on the ash-covered world and the baby-eating
survivalists who have been threatening our protagonists the whole novel. Instead, there is talk of the “breath of God”
and the image of a “brook trout in the streams in the mountains” (286). And that last sentence: “In the deep glens
where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of a mystery.” What the fuck is that about? “[H]ummed of a mystery” is a phrase brimming
with life and wonder, a drastically different tone than what we’ve had up to now. Is it a sign that things will be okay? Is it a kind of life-preserver for those of
us who have traveled all this way and need some sign or hope before we close the
book? Could McCarthy not stomach his own
bleakness at the end? I don’t know. I can’t read it hopefully, personally,
because I’ve seen too much in the previous 280-some pages. But maybe you can.
Oh, and speaking
of hopeful, there’s something potentially hopeful in the vocabulary of the
book. While the syntax is simple, the
vocabulary is not, or at least it’s not always simple. McCarthy has an impressively large vocabulary,
but the choice to bring it into this book and this setting is exactly that: a
choice. Words like “salitter,” “bollards,”
“crozzled,” “loggia,” “palladian,” and “tidewrack”—just to name a few—had me
running to the dictionary every couple of pages. Why do that?
Are they just reminders of the lost world, like the burned ruins our protagonists
travel through? Or are they reminders of
the fire itself, traces of cultures and society, the ingenuity and
determination of humankind? Likely both,
I say, but whatever the reason, it feels ripe with meaning and possibility.
I didn’t even get
to touch on such amazing scenes as Ely, the old man who is compared to the gods
and Buddha; or the plantation on which human being are repeating history by holding
captive and consuming victims for the plantation-occupiers’ own well-being; or
the caravan of pregnant women and soldiers, like a scene out of a Mad Max
film—the only thing in the book that resembles the Mad Max vision of a
post-apocalyptic future; or the finding of the sextant, the only thing that the
man finds beautiful in the whole book, an ancient tool used to guide wanderers
when there were no shores, a perfectly apt tool, redolent with symbolic
possibilities. There are so many
wonderful scenes and moments to talk about, analyze, and mine for meaning.
I will
undoubtedly be returning to this book again someway down the road. I can tell that my brain and heart aren’t done
with it. I’d love to hear about your own
thoughts about and experiences with it.
