An Ethical Dilemma

“Are we still the good guys? he said. Yes. We’re still the good guys . . . Were they the bad guys? Yes, they were the bad guys.”

Living in a post-apocalyptic world without social regulation or responsibility, a father and son constantly discuss what it means to be a good guy versus a bad guy in an environment where a discussion of ethics would appear to be unwarranted. The terminology “good guys” and “bad guys” has often been used as the title of a child’s game. To draw a distinction between “good guys” and “bad guys” as mutually exclusive forces smacks at childish simplicity. Yet, politicians seem as easy with the terminology as children. In a pre-election interview with Katie Couric, Governor Sarah Palin advocated for her views on the Iraq War and Israel by saying “It is obvious to me who the good guys are in this one and who the bad guys are” (“Palin on Foreign Policy”). While politicians and children may find it  easy to draw the line between what constitutes good and bad, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road obscures the distinction between the two through the story of a man and his son that are seemingly the only good guys in a world of cannibalistic bad guys.

Using terminology his child would understand, the man establishes for the boy that they are, in fact, the good guys and maybe even the only good guys left in the world; however, the boy with his childlike hopefulness is eager to find more good guys like them, a risk which the man is not as eager to take. The man assumes that almost every one else they encounter is a bad guy, despite constant prodding from the boy about the possibility that other people “could be the good guys” (103). However, the novel does not make clear what exactly it means to be a good guy in this post-apocalyptic society, for the father, who adamantly claims to be a good guy, is only distantly linked to the morality of the past.

The novel blurs the distinction the man draws for his son between what makes somebody good or bad with the man’s questionable behavior toward the other “good guys” in the novel. The man fails to realize his own capacity for being a bad guy, and despite the man’s assurance otherwise, his actions often resemble the behavior of a bad guy. It is only because of the child’s insistence, for example, that the man gives Ely, the elderly man they meet on the road, any food; the man tells Ely “you should thank him you know . . . I wouldn’t have given you anything.” Instances like these in the novel provoke the boy to constantly ask his father for assurance: “Are we still the good guys?” In the father’s mind, the two will always remain the good guys simply because they do not eat humans, yet the father does not seem to value human life, other than his and the boy’s, any more than the “bad guys” do.  Both the good guys and the bad guys are willing to harm others in order to survive.  Though with an apparently simple glance the man establishes who is good and who is bad, even when he encounters some of his fellow good guys that are trapped in a cellar and in need of his help, the man does not hesitate to think only of himself and his son; he abandons the helpless prisoners. The son seems to find his father’s behavior puzzling and is still unclear, even at the end of the novel, what makes a person one of the good guys, for after his father’s death, he asks the man offering to become his new guardian, “How do I know you’re one of the good guys?” His question suggests that even he is not able to determine the difference between the good and the bad after all.

Ironically, the only constant representation of good in the novel is the boy, whose “golden chalice” is “good to house a god”; a boy who doesn’t even know what a Coca Cola is somehow becomes the embodiment of all that is good in the novel. Where the boy gains his inherent goodness is unknown, but he does gain a notion of what it means to be one of the good guys from his father’s stories, if not his father’s behavior. The son recognizes the difference between his father’s stories and his behavior and gets tired of hearing his untruthful stories. The son tells his father “Those stories are not true . . . [I]n the stories we’re always helping people and we don’t help people.” The boy’s only means for seeing what it means to be a good guy can only be found in one of his father’s fictions, not in his own reality.

The behavior of “bad guys” and “good guys” reveals that when a civilization ceases to exist, so do the ethics of that civilization, a situation which contributes to the way the stark contrast between the good and bad is undone in the novel. The two seem indistinguishable, since murder is no longer an ethical dilemma for many of the survivors when their own lives are at stake. While certainly cannibalism is the most grotesque act in the novel, in an effort to survive, the father threatens to kill another man, takes his things, and leaves him to die. The father tries to justify his actions by saying “I wasn’t going to kill him” to which the son replies, “But we did kill him” (260). The man is preoccupied with justifying for the boy and himself any of his actions that are more characteristic of the bad guys than the good guys. The novel suggests the need for a personal ethic when the values of a culture are nonexistent but also reveals that holding to this ethic is nearly impossible when civilization ceases to exist.

If only setting the bounds for determining the good from the bad were as easy a task as the man says, most everyone could consider themselves to be a good guy, as long as they don’t eat humans and don’t give up. However, the line separating the two opposing categories of human beings is not an easy one to draw, for each party considers the other to be the bad guy. This reasoning is essential as justification for inflicting harm upon another human being.  While at this point in history we may not be able to identify with a post-apocalyptic world, we all can see in the world the problems that emerge through the recognition that ethics can easily serve the interests of their makers, a dilemma the novel does not resolve but masterfully brings to the surface.

--Alisha Tynes, UWF Student