The End of The Road

You will not be able to put down The Road, Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel. Horrifyingly lucid, indelibly tender, at once poetic and prophetic, The Road defies comparison.

On the road south a nameless man and boy walk with extreme caution, pushing a grocery cart with their meager belongings, through a burned and sometimes still burning American wasteland. The disaster, some years back, never becomes clear. The single concrete geographical reference in the novel is the common barn-sign: “See Rock City.”  

Still, readers familiar with McCarthy’s (and Southern) geography will understand them to come through Knoxville, across Newfound Gap, into the Carolina Piedmont, and finally to a beach on the Atlantic. They seek and do not find warmth. They do encounter the grisliest depravities—amputees locked in a cellar, to be eaten limb by limb; sexual slaves, dragged along in chains by the few remaining “bloodcults;” an infant charred on a spit.  In this permanent winter even the ashen ocean has died.   
It’s easy to read this bleak book as altogether negative. Indeed, given its sheer horror, how should we read it—as science fiction, premonitory horror, nihilistic allegory? Why did Oprah choose it for her book club? Do negative readings miss anything?
The boy, born in the destruction, knows only the dead world. His mother has killed herself. The man is dying of lung disease. McCarthy reminds us continuously of “the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable.” Father and son are “two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.” Where is divine presence in this world?

It’s in the language, in the way McCarthy shows the boy, through the man’s eyes: “He sat beside him and stroked his pale and tangled hair. Golden chalice, good to house a god.” McCarthy’s youngest son, asleep in an El Paso hotel, inspired this novel, which is dedicated to him, and the man’s love for the boy fuels this story. Early the father thinks: “He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

Gradually the boy reveals something divine. He tells his father: “I am the one.” They call themselves the “good guys” and they “carry the fire.” The man sees him “glowing in that waste like a tabernacle.” “There was light all about him,” where there is no source for light, and “when he moved the light moved with him.” The fire, the father tells him: “It’s inside you.” His last thought is: “Goodness will find the little boy.” And goodness does, in the form of a surviving couple. The boy asks if they are carrying the fire and the survivor replies, “Yeah. We are.” And the woman tells the boy that “the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.” In spite of the destruction of the world and the relentlessly palpable fear and dread and loss, can we miss McCarthy’s mystical implication?  

At the same time, this incomparable novel admonishes us in its final words not to destroy “a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where [once the brook trout] lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

-- Allen Josephs, University Research Professor