The Road by Cormac McCarthy discussion

Cormac McCarthy creates a terrifyingly real, apocalyptic world in his novel The Road. You can vividly picture McCarthy’s world through his incredibly simplistic use of detail and metaphor and his depiction of his two protagonists. Though both simple and complicated, the father and son are fantastically real and tragic. Their story allowed me as a reader to truly understand the world that McCarthy beautifully illustrates with the fewest of words.

I found myself lost in what seems at first glance to be a simple father son companionship but evolves into an ever changing, correlative relationship. The man and the boy depend on each other because they both hold a part of one another; the boy holds the man’s innocence and the man holds the boy’s maturity. It is this mutual dependency that causes an evolution of faith and reversal of roles by the end of the novel.

The young boy is constantly seeking the maturity that the man holds. Though not raised in this barren world, the man has adapted to its coldness. He understands how to survive with barely anything. He has come to terms with the fact that other humans are enemies and nothing more. So what is it that the young boy wants to learn from him? To survive. The young boy knows he will have to live without his father, which he makes clear when he says that he “is the one” who has to worry. He constantly wants to learn because he knows that one day he will be alone, and it will be his father’s maturity that will help him to say alive.

It’s a quick moment in the book. The father asks where the boy heard such a thing as long-term goals. The answer is simple. “You said it.” As fast as this moment of dialogue can be read, I think it’s actually one of the more defining moments of the book. It seems pretty cliché to say that the boy is shaped by his experiences, so I won’t. I don’t mean to say that the boy has somehow blocked out the dying world around him. That’s about as far from the truth as I could get. But I do think that the boy has been shaped more by his father’s actions and lessons than by his surroundings.

They live in a world that contains nothing to live for but survival itself. Yet the boy has faith, not only in the good of people but also in God, a thought that seems absent from the other adults of this story. So where does a boy who has known nothing but a broken, evil world find such faith? In the man who raised him. In flashbacks we get an image of a man who seems to carry some sort of hope in him, a faith that there is something worth living for. When his wife begs him to follow her into death, he finds enough reason to say no. He has faith that even in this awful situation, living is still better than death.

It is this faith that he once had that he decides to pass down to his son. He kindles the belief that they are "carrying the fire."

Though in the novel, we are introduced to the man in the last stages of his life the innocence of the boy gives us a glimpse of how the man once was. The man gave his innocence to his son and though he has lost it in his own being, he still believes in its importance and holds on to it dearly in order to accept his own death.

“I thought I could let my son die in my arms but I can’t.” Perhaps to some this would seem a moment of weakness. Instead I would propose it a moment of strength, courage, and ultimate trust. I cannot imagine how painful it would be to leave your only son alone in a world that you yourself fear. It is not that the father cannot face the thought of his son dying. They’ve lived in that desolate world long enough for the thought to be impossible for him. It is that he has to face the fact that his son has to live. Washington Post author Ron Charles writes, “The fear of dying…is balanced by the fear of surviving.” I believe this is especially true here. The father is not afraid of death. He is afraid of life. I believe that is why he holds on to the boy’s innocence so dearly through out the book and encourages him to believe in the fire. The man has lost sight of faith in this world, but he knows that his son has the chance to believe.

By the end of the book we see a transformation in the boy and when the father's body starts to fail him in the last few pages of the novel, the boy is there to now take care of his father, instead of the other way around. The father tells his son to talk to him. He'll always be there for the boy. This is the final moment of maturity. He trusts his son to carry him with him now. The man has taught the boy how to live in this world. I think it’s important to point out that even in the process of reversing roles the boy does not lose his faith. He is able to find a balance. He is alone and he must now use everything that his father has taught him during their time together. Yet, he still finds importance in carrying the fire.

This is a quiet, thoughtful, meditative take on the novel, sans flashy all-encompassing thesis that makes a big splash. Light on sources, yet heavy on interpretation. The paragraph with how survival is even worse than dying is very good. From the thesis, though, I had thought it would be equally about boy and father, but the essay itself concentrates on the boy.