Cormac
McCarthy, the revered novelist of America, who wrote 12 novels—The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, Child of
God, Suttree, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, Cities of
the Plain, No Country for Old Men, The Road, The Passenger and Stella Maris—two plays, five
screenplays, and three short stories, is known for his bleakly violent and
apocalyptic visions expressed in his unique writing style. Saul Bellow praised
his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing
sentences”.
McCarthy’s novels reveal to us the depths that mankind can descend to and also the mountains that it can climb. In the novels, The Orchard Keeper, Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, The Crossings, and No Country for Old Men, he mostly dealt with the lives of the marginalized against the backdrop of the communities and landscapes of the American Southwest that he was familiar with.
Many
critics praise Blood Meridian— the scorched-earth epic that narrates the
violent tale of a teenage wanderer with nihilism’s triumph over morality
running as an undercurrent—as his most brilliant novel. The noted literary
critic, Harold Bloom, describing it as “not only the ultimate western” but “the
ultimate dark dramatization of violence”, places McCarthy along with three
other contemporaries, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, who in his
opinion touched the sublime.
However,
it is his The Road that appeals to me the most, for it is a profoundly
moving story of a father and son’s journey carried out in desperate tenacity to
get to the warmth of the coast. It is with these two protagonists that the
novel explores the themes of moral conflict, survival, hope, and redemption—all
against the backdrop of utter lack of hope and total devastation. It is indeed
a pen portrait of the worst and the best that mankind is capable of!
It is pretty interesting to know
how the seed of this novel germinated: On a trip to El Paso, Texas around 2005 with
his son of four years, one night McCarthy looked out of their hotel room and
saw a sleepy town in whose silence he could only hear the whistling of past
running trains. It is in that eerie silence that he saw in his mind’s eye
burning hills and everything being laid waste sometime in the future and
wondered about his little boy. And it is this image that he told Oprah Winfrey
in his interview with her as the origin of The Road.
And
thus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The
Road happens at an undated, post-apocalyptic time in the future, probably in
the United States, during which the world as we know it has ended for an
undefined reason. All that is left behind is a vast cloud of ash enveloping Earth
that made “the track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk”. It is in
this cold and gray landscape, that a father and son, both unnamed, take to the
road on foot with the hope to survive, come what may.
The
road on which they journey with a grocery cart that is filled with their
belongings and supplies for the journey indeed symbolizes their drive to keep
moving and keep surviving, unmindful of the circumstances. Father and son share
a deep bond of love. As they journey
along the road “in that cold autistic dark”, they replenish their supplies by
scavenging food and clothing from the ruins of homes, farms, and towns.
The
father-son relationship is shown in the beginning itself as something holy. The
man tells the boy: “My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that
by God. I will kill anyone who touches you.” The man tells the boy stories of
justice and courage hoping that they will keep the fire alive in the boy. Equally,
the boy exhibits faith in the man and strives to carry the fire. But as the journey
advances, he, assuming himself and his father are good guys, begins to question
the man whenever he does something which is contrary to this assumption.
They
indeed, encounter horror after horror, yet won’t lose their humanity. On the
way, they come across a few cannibals who ambushed a few people and kept them alive
as food. They somehow manage to escape the same fate. As things turned out to
be okay and as they keep journeying forward, the boy asks:
We wouldn’t ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not. …
Even if we are starving?
No, we wouldn’t.
No matter what.
No. No matter what.
Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.
All
through their journey we witness the father and son encountering moral
conflict. On the road, they come upon another traveler, said to be Ely. At the
insistence of the boy, father agrees to share food with him, but tells the boy
that he cannot stay with them for long. Next day as they get ready to part
ways, the boy gives Ely some food which his father reluctantly approves. For,
it risks their journey’s primary goal of survival.
As
they continue their journey to the south, they come across towns and landscapes
that turned skeletons of their past. They see empty houses, vehicles, and bones
of animals and humans alike. Finally, on arriving at the coast, the boy, seeing
the gray-looking ocean, turns aghast, for he was expecting it to be blue. But
both of them however swim in the ocean which lifts up their spirits.
On
returning to their camp they notice that their belongings have been stolen. On
catching the thief, father makes him strip his clothes and leaves him on the
road to freeze. The boy protests it. But the father chides him: “You’re not the
one who has to worry about everything.” The boy, who by then acquired a strong
moral compass, carrying the fire, says to his father, “Yes I am. I am the one.”
At it, the father, leaving the clothes on the road for the thief to pick up,
seeks redemption solely for the sake of his son to forgive him.
The
journey harps on hope in many ways—holding on to hope, losing hope and finding
hope again, and so on. In his concern for protecting the child, the man is
determined to survive through his rapidly deteriorating health. Indeed, he
clings to hope so steadfastly that when the boy, seeing another boy walking
alone, asks “Do you think he was lost?”, he replies:
No, I don’t think he was lost…
I’m scared that he was lost.
I think he’s all right
But who will find him if he’s lost? Who
will find the little boy?
Goodness will find the little boy. It
always has. It will again.
Realizing
that he won’t be around for long, the man prepares the son to carry on: “A lot
of bad things have happened, but we are still here… that’s a pretty good story.
You need to keep going. You have to carry the fire”.
Eventually,
the man dies. But his hope for goodness proves right. As the boy stays with the
body of his dead father, ‘goodness’ in the form of a savior comes to him with a
shotgun inviting him into his family … perhaps into a holy commune where its holy mother ensures the boy about the breath of God passing “from man to man
through all of time …”
The novel, which is as humane as
it is harrowing, thus comes to an end with a flickering hope that good guys are
out there to redeem humanity and eliminate the cannibalistic and inhumane
instincts of others.
Goodness is here aplenty and it
is always worth fighting for survival, no matter the circumstances— “This is
what good guys do. They keep trying. They don’t give up” —is perhaps what McCarthy
wants to say through the father and son’s journey.
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