The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy writes well. I mean, really well. So well that he can tell an awful, awful story, one of the most awful stories imaginable, and make it something haunting but brilliant. A father and his son trod through a gray and black world apocalypse scavenging to survive on the canned goods they can wrest from a plantless landscape and avoiding all people, the only living things left, because they can and will eat anyone in sight. And that’s it. “Just beyond the high gap in the mountains they stood and looked out over the great gulf to the south where the country as far as they could see was burned away, the blackened shapes of rock standing out of the shoals of ash and billows of ash rising up and blowing downcountry through the waste. The track of the dull sun moving unseen beyond the murk” (12).

The end contains the tiniest sliver of hope but is more destitute inevitability than anything else. McCarthy reveals little of the details, but the antecedents for such a scene are imaginable to anyone living post-WWII. We already possess the ability to reduce the world to nothingness, or worse than nothingness, marginal survival drawn out in the most meager and abandoned circumstances imaginable.

So what is most powerful in this almost prose poem of post-civilization is its immediacy, its possibility. We could destroy the world. Easily.

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it” (110).

More subtle, like a lighter shade of gray amid the variegated tones, is the weak but steadfast faith the father, and so the son, maintains in hope and God. He tells his son they are “carrying the fire,” and whether their flame will persist to illuminate a civilization once more (and whether this is even desirable after humans have almost destroyed themselves) becomes irrelevant. They are carrying the fire, and they can do no more, and perhaps no less.