Many different visions are created when thinking about the apocalypse. Everyone seems to have their own idea of what the apocalypse will look and feel like. Often overlooked, however, is what will happen after the apocalypse? In Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road, he offers the post-apocalyptic struggle rather than depicting what actually happened to make the world so dark and bleak. McCarthy leaves you assuming and questioning throughout the whole novel, but never actually tells how the world was left in ruins. The Road constantly refers to the world as dark, burnt and full of ash. The setting reveals the true grim nature of the novel and McCarthy’s description of the setting engulfs the reader into a world where compassion and trust are hard to come by. The Road features the struggle of two characters: the man and the boy, neither of which are ever named. McCarthy focuses the entire novel on the perilous journey the man and boy face to get to the coast where they hope they will find a human colony of survivors. The Road offers more significance than just a tale of a man and boy’s expedition. Deeper meanings can be derived from McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic story when explored in further detail.
Hope is a reoccurring theme throughout The Road. In a world filled with death and misery, hope is one of the main things that drive the man and boy to keep moving. Throughout the novel the man perseveres through hardships because he looks to the boy as a sense of good in the world. The man keeps going because he believes that the boy’s life represents hope which instills the man to never give up and to always have the will to survive. In this aspect the boy can be viewed as a messiah-like figure to the man because he is the reason the man strives to live. The world of The Road displays no presence of a divine figure, everything is dead and everyone is fighting for survival. The boy provides the divine figure for the man to hope and believe in. If the boy was not there the man would have given up a long time ago. The boy can also be viewed in the messiah facet because he always wants to help people. The boy expresses compassion to strangers on the road and he continually tries to feed and accompany strangers they come across. One example of this is when the man and boy meet up with the old man. The boy insists that they feed and clothe the old man despite all of the man’s rejections. The boy has hope that he will find journeymen along the road that are friendly, even though he has encountered many that have caused danger and harm. The boy has been in numerous dangerous situations such as; when the man and boy were searching for food in the cellar of a barn and they found suffering enslaved civilians who were being tortured inside, the boy still begged the man to stop and help any and every straggler along the road. McCarthy reveals a world in The Road where everything good appears lost, and death is only inevitable. Hope is a constant theme in The Road it is what drives the man to live and the boy to insist on helping those in need.
Another theme in The Road is the man and boy’s role as “the good guys”. The man justifies all his actions throughout the novel by stating that whatever he does is what the “good guys” do. Many of the man’s deeds would normally be viewed as unjust and unkind; for example, when the thief steals the cart from the beach, the man finds the thief and forces him to remove all his clothes and shoes and lay them in the cart, and then he tells the thief to flee. Although stealing is looked down upon, the thief was struggling to live and did whatever he could to survive. Is stealing in this situation wrong? McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world is filled with terror so is it just to say making rash and inconsiderate decisions is fair? The division between good and evil is a fine line in The Road, and only the reader can decide who to side with. The boy constantly objected to the man’s way of dealing with situations, and the man’s only response to these objections is that he is doing what the “good guys would do”. Where the man only thought of his and the boy’s survival, the boy was compassionate to all along the road and constantly fought for the man to help others. The man knew of the evil that existed in the world of The Road, contrary to the boy who was much less educated, so this gave the man sufficient reasoning to only protect him and the boy. The argument can be made for either case, but the novel continues to bring up the contradiction of morality and survival. Whether the man represents good or evil, McCarthy wants The Road to be a gut wrenching tale asking the reader to decide right from wrong.
Dreams are a big aspect of The Road. The man is continually telling the boy that good dreams cause one to relax and lose the urge to survive; he adds on to say that good dreams entail death. Nightmares or dreams that depict the suffering and turmoil of what the man and boy are experiencing in real life, keep the man and boy striving to live. The man welcomes his many upsetting dreams that depict danger and loathes the return of dreams that display his old life and the world prior to the apocalypse. The boy’s dreams offer a different truth claim however; his dreams seem to expose future events that the man and boy will encounter. An example of this is when the boy dreams of the windup toys and then later in the novel the men walking across the field are described as walking in the form of windup toys. Another example is when the boy awakes from a dream where the boy was calling out for the man but he wouldn’t answer. This is foreshadowing for the end of the book, because when the man dies the boy is left holding the man’s dead body calling out his name but there is no answer. Once the boy realizes that his dreams tend to foreshadow the future, he decides to no longer recount his dreams to his papa. The man and boy’s dreams are both important factors in each ones survival. The man uses his nightmares as a motivation to stay alive, whereas the boy is afraid of his nightmares because they suggest evil and disastrous outcomes in his and the man’s future.
In The Road the only setting and conditions the boy knows is the current destroyed and desolate landscape. The man knows both the original world he lived in, and the new post-apocalyptic one. This makes it hard for the man to see his son grow up in this terrible world when he as boy got to live in a world where everything was colorful, food was plentiful, and life ran smoothly. The boy knows little of this world, only stories the man tells him and occasional objects that pop up long from the past. The boy is skeptical of the past world because all he knows about the past is the man’s accounts of what the world used to be like. There are some “artifacts” such as the coke the man found in the vending machine or past technology in stores of a formerly industrialized city that the boy can go off of too. For the most part, however, the boy knows nothing of the preexisting world. The man struggles to find the coast and regain the world he used to live freely in. Fish is a medium McCarthy uses to flashback and look at the past. In the last passage McCarthy makes a reference to fish and how they were one of the first creatures here. Throughout The Road fish are mentioned in conversation as extinct and with the last passage it can be inferred that everything in the post-apocalyptic world will die, because if fish, which outlasted most species, can’t survive than nothing can survive.
Although the last passage and the man’s death in The Road leave an unhopeful ending to the novel, the reference of “carrying the fire” throughout the novel almost negates the unhopeful ending leaving the reader to believe the boy will survive. While the man is dying he tells the boy that the boy will be fine because he always gets lucky. A few pages later a group of friendly road goers find the boy on the road and take him in as one of their own. “Carrying the fire” is a constant phrase used throughout The Road which is a term used to express the struggle to survive and continue on to find a better place. The man and boy travel along the road during the novel desperately trying to get to the coast and find a better life. When they get to the coast and realize there is nothing there they continue their journey always trying to find something better. They “carry the fire” because they are trying to continue human existence on earth. When the man dies he leaves it up to the boy to find other survivors who are trying to stay alive, and find a way to restore normality to the world. When the boy first sees the voyagers along the road after his papa dies he asks if they “carry the fire”. The boy determines that they are his best chance of survival and follows them only to continue on his journey to find a colony of survivors.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has many meanings that can be derived from it. Besides being a bleak and dark setting, The Road offers insight of a hope driven world where good and evil are hard to separate. The novel relies on dreams and a past life to guide the characters. McCarthy author’s a deep and meaningful book that depicts the struggle of a dad and his son just trying to live a normal and fear-free life. The Road ends on a somewhat hopeful note and it can only be debated what lies in store for the boy as he continues on his journey over the road.
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