I recently read Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel “The Road,” which won the Pulitzer Price for Fiction. There are no daughters in the story, but some of the dynamics seemed appropriate to this blog.
They story is about a father and son traveling across a post-apocalyptic landscape. They are on the road that leads from the horrible past to some unknown future. The father clings to dwindling hope that he can somehow save his only son, that there is a place of safety they will find. The boy hopes for nothing and believes only in his father. They are each other’s everything.
While almost unrelentingly dark, the story concludes with a faint glimmer of dawn. But the self-sacrificing love depicted throughout is what made it terrible to read and impossible to put down. McCarthy uses his efficient descriptions to sketch all we need to know of a desolate world peopled largely with cannibalistic humans. His spare dialog does the same thing for the relationship between the man and boy. Never telling too much, he allows the reader to render it as mental images.
There is great stuff for greenies and peaceniks in this story. It is a fully wrought story on the end of the world with realistically imagined consequences for everything on earth. But what makes it work is the relationship between father and son. I was particularly moved by the way the man was able to instill values, morals, and hope beyond understanding in his young child. In a world where survival was all that mattered to most, this father was able to make it believable and achievable to do what was right as best you could. He tells his son: We’re the keepers of the flame. Everything around says there is no flame to be kept; it has been extinguished. And yet the boy believes and that gives hope for all of humanity.
I love McCarthy. He is a modern Hemingway and more. And I agree with those reviewers who consider “The Road” his best work to date. Read it at your own hazard, read it to understand the nature of hope and how children are the living embodiment of that.
Tags: CarmacMcCarthy, The Road, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, environmentalism, father, son
