The Road, by McCarthy (spoilers)
 

A friend of mine says this about The Road:

???

Pointlessness? Outcome already set?

I mean I get what he is saying. But seriously, did we read the same book?

I wonder if this is a book that parents will read in a different way than yuppie non-parents.

A very odd response.

I think you hit on the difference, although I don't discount the ability of those without kids to understand The Road.

In any event, your friend's analysis is dead wrong. Quite apart from not understanding the book, he clearly doesn't know the context in which McCarthy wrote the book, as a man who had a child, a son, in old age.

That's partly why I like this book so much. You get such a variety of reactions from readers.

I can feel the man's love for the boy, and it tugs at any father's heart. That a person might not like the story telling style is understandable. It takes a bit to warm up to. But the man's desire to do anything for his son pulls you in.

Mike's friend sounds like an individual without a heart.

I think actually the book is pretty bleak, thematically and dramatically. I think it's about the need to keep trying even when you have absolutely no reason for hope. It's about an ethic of hope absent rational basis for hope. I think he had to give that sliver of reason for hope in the last paragraphs as a suggestion or a hope that there is always reason to hope even if it seems like there isn't. But the novel is pretty bleak. The payoff for the father contining to try is really just those few years he spent with his son amid that blasted environment. That should be enough, hard as such a life was, the novel tells us.

What does it mean to live? What does it mean to die?

What do these questions mean in earth become hell?

And likewise, what it does it mean to live or die in our current world?

What choices do we make to live, while we live?

What choices do we make to die? After all, we are all dying.

In many ways the conversations between the man and the boy are a discussion about the ethics of living. Boiled down to their very essence. The choices that the man makes are not the same as the boy would make. And also the choices that the man makes that he does not articulate to the boy--that is, the decision to kill the boy or not.

It may be silly, but The Road has influenced me on a very small thing. There are these magazines that are sold with windows and without windows. That is, a gap to indicate by a quick glance, at how full the magazine is. This could be useful to the shooter.

But The Road tells me that it is also useful to an enemy.

Not getting the windows. :)

Good questions. Clearly you get it, you have the gift. Stated another way, here is one of my favorite scenes in the McCarthy canon , coming very near the end of the Border Trilogy:

"Billy watched the light bring up the shapes of the water standing in the fields beyond the roadway. Where do we go when we die? he said. I don’t know, the man said. Where are we now?"

This exchange occurs as Billy Parham is sitting under a viaduct, reduced in old age to being a street person by the terrible spirit breaking events of his life. In some respects The Road might be the least bleak of McCarthy's novels. Mabye his son in old age gave him some reason for optimism.

I bogged down in the 2nd book of the Border Trilogy. His philosophical meanderings became extremely tedious, and it just wasn't worth the effort.

You can convey philosophy in story form. Like in The Road. Like in some of the interludes in "For Whom the Bell Tolls". You don't need some random old dude sitting in an abandoned pueblo blathering for page after page after page.

In fact, you could look at this book's structure as nothing more than a journey down a road (which actually reminds me of Huckleberry Finn going down the Mississippi, now that I think about it) with episodic events, with the sole purpose of each event to present an ethical dilemma. Followed by a wrap-up discussion of the ethics between the man and the boy.

A very key point in the novel is when the boy points out the dissonance between what the man says, about them being the good guys, "but we never save anyone."

In fact, without the philosophical struggle between the man and the boy, I don't think you have a novel here. Imagine a scared boy who simply agrees with the man on everything. Boring.

In my own journeys, I have discovered that most people have zero inclination (and perhaps ability) to think about ethics. And to the extent that this novel might go over their heads, this is the reason.

Now, this is not a summation of the novel in its entirety, but it's an essential part of it.

Actually no, McCarthy argues, in the man's actions at the end, that that is NOT enough. Being together is what it was, but it is not enough. After promising that he would take the boy with him to the grave to "save him" he cannot do so. We've always had luck, he says, do what we have done before. Go forth my son. Despite the odds.

It is not his to grant mercy that extinguishes faith, no matter how desperate.

....

The hopeful ending with the shotgun wielding man and his group....

McCarthy bookends the book, in a way with women. The boy's abandonment by his mother's suicide. Then at the end, "the woman" appears again, not his mother, but a woman, who is portrayed as dear to the boy. In the gap between these two women, is the man. By bookending the novel with women, McCarthy may have intended to magnify the idea that this was an exploration of what it is to be a man, and what it is to be a father. What is it specifically that a man can give to his son?

Are we saving anyone today? In the ashen circumstances of The Road, it's easy to see how to "save someone" -- it is to feed them, to free them from the meatlocker. Who is McCarthy saving today? Who does he save in his personal life apart from his writing?

Is nobody being saved today? Do we pass each other by, to die, in order to self preserve?

How am I to save anybody today?

Discussions of an author's personal life, are tedious beyond imagination. They are not important. The work is wholly separate from the artist. Read some of Kundera's non-fiction to know what I am talking about.

I don't care about McCarthy's personal life. I care about The Road's questions and the way we answer those questions right now. I care as much about whether you are saving anybody as I do about whether McCarthy is -- not much. What I care about is how we save people today in the modern world. Do we still ask the same questions as the boy? More importantly, do we give the same answers as the dad? How do you save someone today? Do you not save anyone b/c you feel like it would imperil the survival of your family?

These are all good points. Some say McCarthy for all his genius really can't do women except as flat symbols. I can't think of a time he's ever been in a woman's head.

On a totally unrelated subject, how about McCarthy's technical brilliance in writing about physical objects. Much of the girth of this slight novel is made up by detailed descriptions of the father's desperate work. In other novels he goes into great detail describing fairly ordinary or repetitious manual labor. These descriptions, though detailed, are always deeply engaging to me, despite that I have never been a guy like the protagonists to the extent of the work they are good at. Here McCarthy shows his unsurpassed skill.

Another area where he excels is his fairly economical but brilliantly cinematic descriptions of the natural environment, even when imaginary as in the Road. Often he paints a scene and the writing is so good it really makes a film superfluous. Sometimes there are metaphorical elements in his natural descriptions.

My point is that it is dumb to drag McCarthy, the author, into the discussion.

But the general point that as much as the novel raises questions about ethics in the world it presents, it also raises the implied point about facing these same questions in our current world.

I personally have struggled with some of these scenarios, some of which I have discussed. Where literally I have felt like I could be risking my hide, at no personal gain, with disastrous results for my own family should I perish, for some possible theoretical gain for another person. I still struggle with it.

In Harold Bloom's prologue to Blood Meridian he calls the novel a genuine work of genius, easily the best novel by any living American writer, for these reasons:

1) The descriptions of nature

2) The descriptions of violence; Bloom says these initially made the novel unreadable to him but the artistry of the imagery transports the violence into metaphor, as in the Iliad.

3) Maybe most of all, the judge's philosophical monologues.

Like Elizabeth Smart's dad who employed the homeless man who abducted and abused his daughter and unbelievably did not kill her.

Or the bishop who neglects family to visit the sick.

Those are probably bad examples, as in The Road, to save another truly would have resulted in death. Or would it have? The family, after all, took the boy in in the end.

A slight disagreement with you. I find an author's personal life very interesting in at least one respect: how does the author answer the very questions he raises? I guess this is interesting to me for the same reasons why it's interesting to learn about a prophet's personal life. Words versus actions.

If you've read the letters of Flannery O'Connor, her work means much more to you. But the same is not true for all authors, for sure. I agree with you about kundera. And why Franzen thought we would want to read a memoir already about his short, self-involved life, I have no idea.

To SU's point, I agree that McCarthy's descriptions of the physical environment are remarkable in The Road. Only a few pages in I asked myself: how is he doing this? Why is the setting unmistakable and vivid?

So I listed the adjectives he used -- remarkably, there weren't that many, and they were all ordinary; none too showy or obscure. And he used the same ones over and over. "Gray." "Ash." "Dead." "Cold." "Dark."

If you have a singular vision, and know how to describe it with economy and familiarity, then that is worth a million words (or pictures).

I love the opeing scene where he describes the dream with the monster by the lake in a cave, that looks up at him with those dull eyes like spiders' eggs.

Here is one of my favorite descriptions ever of God in literature, by "the exmormon" in The Crossing:

"Who can dream of God? This man did. In his dreams God was much occupied.
Spoken to He did not answer. Called to did not hear. The man could see Him
bent over his work. As if through a glass. Seated solely in the light of His
own presence. Weaving the world. In His hands it flowed out of nothing and
in His hands it vanished into nothing once again. Endlessly, Endlessly. So.
Here was a God to study. A God who seemed a slave to His own selfordinated
duties. A God with a fathomless capacity to bend all to an inscrutable
purpose. Not chaos itself lay outside of that matrix. And somewhere in that
tapestry that was the world in its making and in its unmaking was he and he
woke weeping."

P. 149, paperback version

What do you make of it?

Some more cool stuff the exmormon says:

"For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them."

"Because what can be touched falls into dust there can be no mistaking these things for the real."

"Things separate from their stories have no meaning."

"The events of the world can have no separate life from the worl."

I would weep after those dreams of God as well. Like a child playing legos. Where's the agency of the creations? I'd feel used, a pawn.

Haven't read the book, but maybe exmormon was touched that he was even a part of the "selfordinated duties" and a part of the tapestry.

But I'd feel like a toy.

The tale of creation. That is, evolution by natural selection. It's the most basic tale.

I may be violating my own stipulation that the personal life and views of an author don't matter, but Oprah asks McCarthy what he thinks of God and prayer, in his first (and only?) televised interview.

You can look it up on youtube if you wish. It's near the end.

I gave my copy to my father to read. He liked it a lot.

In fact, he just told me that he is reading it a second time now (he first read it just a week or two ago).

I sent it to my parents over a year ago. Never heard back.

i'm joining this discussion late. but i have a few thoughts -- very stripped down ones.

if not "saving anyone" -- what makes the father and son any more good guys than any of the various villains they encounter? there must be more to being the "good guys" than saving others, right?

by the end of the novel, a reader becomes sympathetic and respectful of what the father has done for the son. and of the strangers who agree to take in the son. but why? what makes us appreciate the sacrifice, the hope, the unwillingness to give up of these people -- and at the same time to despise and fear others who present threats to them?


maybe the reader is forced to be sympathetic with these two, merely because they are the only characters we CAN be sympathetic with -- they are the only two we know. if so, then he presents a very tribal viewpoint, wherein "goodness" and "hope" are relative to one's own group. yet, i think there is a higher morality in the father in son, even if they do not or refuse to attempt to save chained-up others.

as usual, mccarthy touches on fate, the everpresence of evil, the murder/bloodlust as an essential aspect of humanity, but also of the more tender desire to shield the innocent from each of those things -- that the desire to nurture hope despite all of those things is somehow good or necessary (or at least can be). shield may not be the best word, though -- the father must explain the violence and depravity of the world to his son -- because he cannot shield his son from it forever. but somehow tempering the exposure to evil/fate/depravity. and explaining it, in a way that father and son seem above it, comes across to us as love.

maybe, mccarthy does the same to the reader -- nurtures my hope as i read -- exposes me steadily to evil/fate/depravity, but does so in a way that i can attempt to understand or overcome it, e.g. by finding some superior or moral in the father's love for his son.

Says the Road Agent.

Nice insights. The hard fact that distinguishes father and son from the other surviving humans except the strangers at the end of the story is that father and son are not killers, not cannibals. They prefer death, if it would come to that, to raising a hand as predators against their fellow humans. The Road teaches that resort to murder and cannibalism to survive is our nature, which we must overcome by virtue. This novel is a powerful rejoiner to Nietzche, who condemned Christianity as going against nature with its central doctrine that the meek are most blessed, and the last shall be the first, i.e., " the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone --and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall in all eternity the unblessed, accursed, and damned!"

In the Road, father and son rebel against nature, follow their ingrained Christian outlook, and win our sympathy.

I don't know that the novel asks to accept or like what the father has done. In fact, the entire novel shows a struggle between the father's ethos and the son's sense of morality.

Not the entire novel. The son's ethos is largely a product of the father's. They disagree on the margins, whether to save a dog, to give some of their precious food to a hopeless old man. They agree it's a bad thing to kill and eat other humans. In this they are in solidarity and apart from virtually all of humankind that still remains.

a very compelling thought. murder as part of human nature seems a common enough thought. murder to the end of cannibalism and survival as part of human nature seems like a bridge too far. but i guess that is the Christian viewpoint (or most any viewpoint of moral imperatives) -- namely, that there is such a thing as "too far" -- even when moral action may risk death and immoral action evade it.

at first glance, survival may seem to be the paramount objective -- but it is not quite paramount -- not quite at any cost. that separateness from world -- the unwillingness to murder and eat other humans -- sets the two main characters apart.

This book can reveal much about the reader.

A friend who read this book told me, "I thought it was homoerotic in a NAMBLA kind of way."

Stunned, I replied, "You mean, you thought there was a homoerotic subtext between the man and his son?"

"Yes."

Yowzers. Who wants to dive into that guys barrel of monkeys?