…all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell.
Such is the world created by Cormac McCarthy in The Road, a brutally bleak post-apocalyptic scenario wherein a father and son struggle to stay alive from hour to hour as they plod along a devastating and pointless journey to the coast.
McCarthy’s ultra-stark, minimalist writing style (if you can call it style) takes some getting used to. It almost seemed pretentious at first – abandoning the use of quotation marks and his eccentric vocabulary – but the jarring nature of the writing supports the utter simplistic and immediate tone of this desolate world.
The man and his son, who remain nameless throughout the story, are clearly the long-term survivors of an unspecified apocalyptic event, probably a nuclear war. The winters are getting worse, food and water are running short, the landscape is scorched, and the ‘men who stalk the road’ are of the vilest nature. These are the elements that father and son face on a daily basis as they trudge along their journey, pushing a shopping cart containing all of their essential belongings (blankets, a tarp, canned food, and some tools), as they follow a rotting map while all the while avoiding any and all other human contact.
Their situation seems most hopeless when you realize that the pistol carried by the father (containing only two bullets) is not for their protection, but for their own suicide, should they encounter a gang of fellow survivors – ‘road agents’, cannibals – and he has to shoot the boy and then himself. In flashback we’re informed that this was the fate his wife chose, for fear of these brutal tribes.
The mutuality of surviving is a powerful and important theme in the relationship between father and son. The boy needs his father to care for him, to protect him, to socialize with, an to love him; and the father is acutely aware that the boy’s very existence gives him purpose… a reason to keep living in an unreasonable world. The intensity of his love for the child (and being a father I can attest that it is appropriately intense) has come to bear all the possible meaning in his life. The boy is the personification of all motive and purpose.
McCarthy fashions their ongoing existence as a series of desperately repetitive circumstances – starvation to plenty to starvation; despair to hope to despair; safety to danger and back again.
The narrative has no chapter breaks. There is no reprieve, apart from the inevitable end. At the same time, there is no real progression; never are we invited to hope (emphasized by the gradual worsening of the man’s cough). Like the man, the reader never really gets anywhere… for there is nowhere to go. What there is, however, is loss and trembling and love precisely expressed. McCarthy is a fantastic writer with artistic command of his style and syntax that is always systematic in its eccentricity.
