"There is No Book and Your Fathers are Dead in the Ground":  Cormac McCarthy's The Road

In an unknown year, in an unknown place, a nameless man and his nameless son walk down a deserted road.  They push a dilapidated shopping cart packed with essential items for survival: worn blankets, a plastic tarp, a collection of canned goods.  Both carry knapsacks also containing essential items in case they are ever forced to abandon the cart and run away.  Their nights are long and very cold.  No star or moon illumines the black sky, and any fires dotting the barren horizon are viewed with hesitation and fear.

Bleak, colorless, and permeated with dread is the post-apocalyptic world of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.  The novel’s two main characters, a man and his young son, travel south along the road in hopes of reaching a place where the sun better penetrates the ash-choked atmosphere.  The fires of human industry have long been extinguished, and all plant and animal life has perished.  There is no food, and drinkable water is scarce.  Indeed, The Road does not present for the casual summer reader a welcome escape from his or her own reality, but a descent into a nightmarish future all too believable for its ominous portrayal of a starved and suffering human population.

Still, the appeal of reading The Road comes not from investigating the extent of human depravity (although McCarthy’s vision of the future is both morbidly fascinating and terrifying), but from the novel’s characters, the man and the boy who persevere despite the most unbearable conditions.  Occasionally the pair will stumble along some relic of the lost past – a can of Coke, a handful of crayons – that serves as a jarring reminder of the empty present, eliciting a powerful nostalgia for days long dead.  Still, the man and his son journey on, “each the other’s world entire.”

At a point when I, like the two exhausted and emaciated protagonists, could barely keep plodding through the novel for want of a single scrap of nourishing cheer, my hope was restored by the simplest of needs fulfilled.  After a terribly failed raid for food in a house that only appeared abandoned, the man and the boy continue their travel, growing weaker at every step.  In a moment of desperation, the man discovers a hidden treasure: an emergency cellar with its food stores intact.  “Can you see?” the man asks his son who cautiously peers into the cellar from above.   “Pears,” the boy says, reading a label his father hands up.  “That says pears.”  In no other book but this one could I so vividly perceive how the sugary syrup preserving canned fruit might taste like the nectar of the gods, or how the pleasure of a full stomach might make a most desolate world seem habitable again.

While time passes slowly and painfully for the man and his son, the The Road itself refuses its readers the easy pause of chapter divisions, rendering each turn of the page as potentially horrific as another bend in the road.  This pace and the sense of impending doom that pervades The Road makes this reader eager to preserve the world of the present if only for fear of the possible world of the future.

--Tina Colvin