"The Road" LRB #5

The Road

By Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is set perhaps it is the fall, but the soot has blocked out the sun, probably everywhere on the globe, and it is snowing, very cold, and getting colder. Color in the world, except for fire and blood, exists mainly in memory or dream. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. ... The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”

This post-apocalyptic novel a father and son set out on a journey to the Gulf Coast seeking warmth and solitude. In this new world time is irrelevant and is only perceived through the rise and fall of the sun. The places are but dilapidated piles of rubble exonerated of all necessities (i.e. food, clean water, other people, etc…). However, the circumstances of the boy and Papa are put through provide a clear effect of sadness and hardship. As anyone who has read the book would know the boy’s mother, Papa’s wife, left them to meet her doom with the cannibals; she gives up her life to, what she things will, save the boy’s life. We are only introduced to her character through a set of flashbacks had by Papa. Another circumstance would be the cannibalism they must fight on a daily basis to stay alive. Papa and the boy almost meet their death’s a several times, at the dungeon house, in the woods, and while seeking refuge in an abandoned building; however, their determination to “keep the fire alive” allows them to persevere and make it until the very end.

This sad and devastating book gives the reader a sense of compassion for the boy; while contrast to the hate felt for Papa. The boy is small, weak, and needs a care giver; his father only wants him to be safe and the reader is faced with a mini heart attack each time Papa contemplates murdering the boy or even himself.