The Road

Citation

McCarthy, Cormac. The road, New York: Random House, 2006.

Annotation

The road is a brutal and tender, despairing and hopeful survival tale.

 ‘It’s a fierce and haunting meditation on the tenuous divide between civilization and savagery.’  It has a mythic poetic quality.

The earth is left in shrouded grey clouds of ash. The landscape is described as ‘scabbed’. Rain and snow mix with ash and toxic dust particles permanently shroud the sky. It is a vast, cold and bleak post apocalyptic world. There is only one season, nuclear winter.

An unnamed man and his young son walk half starved down a road, pushing a shopping cart to get to the sea. Beyond the possibility of starvation and freezing, lies the threat of roving cannibalistic thugs. It is a grim and relentlessly dark novel but its spare precise language is rich with other explorations too, hope in the face of hopelessness, the ephemeral nature of existence and the vanishing worlds we all carry within us.

The book is written in poetic and philosophical paragraphs mirroring the father and son’s journey.  The man solely survives for the boy’s sake, to protect and nurture his son. He reflects on the loss of the world and the humanity he shared. The boy practices hope in a hopeless world.

The dying man tells his son that the fire is real, ’it is inside you. It was always there. I can see it.” The fire of humanity, in the end burns strong and it illuminates the boy.

The road despite its emptiness and ghastly horrors of civilisations slow death

nonetheless carries a fearless wisdom and an ambiguous hope that we can’t help feel the world hangs in the balance of these two travellers hopeless quest. The boy represents the only hope and all that is humane in this chaotic world.  The road won the Pulitzer in 2007.