The Road (novel)
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The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. This grim post-apocalyptic tale describes a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm which destroyed civilization and most life on earth.
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[edit] Synopsis
The Road follows a man and boy, father and son, journeying together for several months across a post-apocalyptic landscape several years after a great cataclysm (which is unspecified, but has some of the earmarks of a nuclear holocaust) destroyed civilization and most life on earth. What is left of humanity now consists largely of bands of cannibals and their prey -- refugees who scavenge for canned food or other surviving foodstuffs. In imagery similar to prospective accounts of "nuclear winter," ash covers the surface of the earth; in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travellers breathe through improvised masks to filter it out. Plants and animals are apparently all dead (deadwood for fuel is plentiful), and the rivers and oceans are seemingly empty of life.
The unnamed father, who is literate, well traveled, and knowledgeable of machinery and woodcraft, realizes that they cannot survive another winter in their present location, and sets out southeastward across what was once the Southeastern United States, largely following the highways. He aims to reach warmer southern climates, and the sea in particular. Along the way, threats to their survival create a more or less constant atmosphere of terror and tension throughout the book.
The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying. He struggles to protect his son from more or less constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the son's own dangerous desire to help the other wanderers they meet. They carry a pistol with two bullets, meant for suicide should this become necessary. The father has told the son to kill himself to avoid being captured. (The boy's mother, overwhelmed by this post-apocalyptic nightmare world, has already committed suicide before the story begins.) The father struggles in times of extreme danger with the fear that he will have to euthanize his son to avoid a yet more terrible fate.
In the face of all of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (McCarthy says that they are "each the other's world entire"), although the man maintains the pretense, and the boy the real faith, that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity -- they repeatedly assure one another that they are among "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire."
In the end, having brought the boy far south after extreme hardship but without finding the salvation he had hoped for, the father succumbs to his illness and dies, leaving the boy alone on the road. Immediately thereafter, however, the grieving and seemingly-lost boy encounters a self-sufficient and benevolent man who has recently been tracking the father and son; this man, who has a family including children, is a manifestation of the "good guys" the father and son had hoped for -- possibly a member of one of the "communes" which are referred to without elaboration in the story. He adopts the boy, and in closing the narrative suggests that the wife of this man is a moral and compassionate woman who treats the boy well, a resolution which vindicates the father's commitment to stay alive and keep moving.
[edit] Opinions/Interpretations
Some reviewers have found religious imagery in the novel, and point to the son's messianic role, seen in his spontaneous impulses to morality and worship, but visible perhaps as much in the father's expectations as in the son's fulfillment.
The story's resolution, which has struck several reviewers as perfunctory or insufficiently prepared, points to a faith in humanity reminiscent of the Nobel Prize address delivered by William Faulkner in 1949. The resolution hints at, without necessarily endorsing, a faith in a God who indwells and preserves mankind, whose breath "[is] his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time."
[edit] Geography
A note on the route traced in the book: The journey passes through towns and cities whose names are known but never named. The travelers apparently set out on their journey north of Knoxville, Tennessee, crossing the Tennessee River at that city. They make a reference to sunken boats under the bridge — a nod to McCarthy's novel Suttree.
They continue through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, across the Great Smoky Mountains — probably over Newfound Gap (elevation 5,048 ft above sea level; see below) — and through the Piedmont region of North Carolina. From there, they proceed southeastward to the coast, perhaps that of South Carolina or Georgia.
[edit] "Rock City"
One rare specific geographical indication in the book is a barn bearing the painted legend "See Rock City". One published book review (that of the novelist William Kennedy, entitled "Left Behind," the cover review in the New York Times Book Review for October 8, 2006), apparently not realizing how many barns in the upper South recommend seeing Rock City, has relied on the reference to infer that the route in The Road must pass through Chattanooga, Tennessee; this is clearly impossible ("The pass at the watershed was five thousand feet and it was going to be very cold," The Road, p. 25).
