The Road (2006)

In this austere and brutal post-apocalyptic tale, McCarthy’s prose recreates the desolation and despair that the end of the world has engendered. While the cause of the Earth’s apocalypse is merely hinted at (everything is covered in ash, so nuclear winter is a plausible inference), its effects are inescapable—and they are encapsulated in this tale of a nameless man and his nameless son, their relationship a microcosm of humankind’s struggle to survive—physically, morally, and spiritually—amidst hopelessness and destruction.

Everything about this novel is bare—the dialogue, the action, the plot. McCarthy can’t even be bothered to spare quotation marks or apostrophes. The minimalist dialogue lacks the usual stylistic markers of punctuation, and rarely is a speaker identified. The reader is thus obligated to concentrate clearly on the verbal exchanges throughout the novel (the majority of which take place between the man and the boy); the spare prose of these conversations carries weighty subtext, and so few words contain such profound meaning that the prose is elevated to poetic power.

The few “action” scenes contained in this tale are genuinely gruesome and brutal—their intensity balances their scarcity—and the reader is left struggling between wanting something to happen (presumably some sign of hope) and dreading whatever might happen next. So few writers can achieve this degree of narrative tension using such minimal style, yet McCarthy has mastered it in devastating fashion. ( )

The view that there are two independent, primal forces in the universe, one good and one evil, is called dualism. According to dualism, the good God does the best he can to promote good and combat evil but he can only do so much since evil is a powerful counterforce in its own right. The ancient Gnostics were dualists with their scriptures emphasizing the mythic rather than the historic and positing our evil world of matter created not by an all-powerful God but by a flawed deity called the Demiurge. In contrast to the Demiurge, the good God of light resides above our earthly material universe in a pure, spiritual realm called the Pleroma.

I mention dualism and Gnosticism here since I read in Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country For Old Men the following dialogue between a good old Texas boy by the name of Sheriff Bell and his old Uncle Ellis:
Sheriff Bell asks: “Do you think God knows what's happenin?”
Uncle Ellis replies – “I expect he does.”
Bell then asks – “You think he can stop it?”
To this Uncle Ellis answers – “No. I dont.”

By these answers, whether he knows it or not, Uncle Ellis is expressing Gnostic dualism. Of course, McCarthy's worldview isn't necessarily the worldview of one of his characters, in this case Uncle Ellis, but my sense after reading No Country for Old Men McCarthy's worldview isn't that far removed from Gnostic dualism; rather, the world and society McCarthy creates is absolutely soaking in evil. The evil is so strong in this McCarthy novel, one could say evil is the primal force of the universe.

A world where evil is the primal force is given an even more complete and deeper expression in McCarthy's post-Apocalyptic novel The Road, where a man and his son travel south to avoid the oncoming winter cold. Why am I saying this? Let me offer a couple observations around two quotes:

We read a reflection of the man when he was a boy about age thirteen prior to the apocalypse, "Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men, watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number; the dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and write and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers." One can only wonder what brought about the actual apocalypse in the novel. Perhaps, similar to these men, world leaders attempted to remedy the image of evil on a macro level.

Here is a typical scene the man and boy come upon: "Beyond a crossroads in that wilderness they began to come upon the possessions of travelers abandoned in the road years ago. Boxes and bags. Everything melted and black. Old plastic suitcases curled shapeless in the heat. Here and there the imprint of things wrested out of the tar by scavengers. A mile on and they began to come upon the dead. Figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling." No more quotes are needed as I am sure you get the idea - a shadowy, menacing, ash-filled landscape populated by humans hunting and killing and eating one another.

What creates the drama in this dark, sinister, stinking world is the love the man has for the boy, his son, and the love the boy has for the man, his papa. Also, the compassion the boy has for those they encounter on the road. All through their experience on the road, can we say the man holds a Gnostic-like dualist view? He experiences the intensity of the world's evil to be sure. However, his belief in a Gnostic light realm is paradoxical. Sometimes he reflects there is only this evil world of matter, harrowing and unrelenting; and yet sometimes he recognizes the boy as a messenger come from that otherworldly realm of light.

Rather than attempting an answer, I suggest reading with these ideas of dualism and Gnosticism in mind as one way of contemplating and appreciating the philosophical dimensions of McCarthy’s bleak novel.



Cormac McCarthy - American novelist and independent spirit par excellence
( )

Beautifully written, a book that I could not down. But it is harrowing and extremely depressing. In a nuclear holocaust, everything living is gone - plants, animals, most humans. The surviving humans are living off of scavenging of what remains - canned food, and each other. A father and son are trying to make it to the sea to survive the winter. The road is extremely dangerous and they encounter things too terrible to see and experience. The relationship between father and son is depicted wonderfully, their love and compassion for each other coming through the dialogue, them being each other's "world entire". Ultimately what made the story so unbearable is its utter hopelessness. How long can they keep going, and where? There is nothing left but cans of food that somehow other looters could not find. No animals to hunt, no crops to raise, no fish to catch. How can they even rebuild when the land has turned to ash, the forests to charred wood, and the sun is gone? What is left to eat when there are no more cans to find? While the writing is amazing and the strory keeps you hooked, the lack of hope makes this book difficult and very, very, very depressing. ( )

I've heard nothing but great things about this book, so of course I had very high expectations when I started reading it a few days ago. I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5 because I found the prose to be almost too spare. I enjoyed this read, but there wasn't enough "meat" for this to be a favorite book of mine. ( )

After 3 false starts with this book, I finally managed to finish it. It took me a while to get over McCarthy's writing style, and I'm still not a fan of it. I generally like dystopian fiction, and this was okay as far as that goes, but it certainly isn't the best dystopian novel ever written. At times, I found myself counting backwards from the last page to see how many pages I had left to read, but in the end, the book turned out to be just interesting enough to finish. The ending, however, was slightly weak, in my opinion. I hesitated to give it 3 stars, but I went ahead and did it since I did enjoy the book at times. ( )