McCarthy has garnered praise from every corner of the world. Students, teachers, librarians and Oprah – of all people – have been blindsided by the raw emotional power of this novel. It won the Pulitzer in 2006 and McCarthy has been praised as one of the greatest living American novelists.
So what is “The Road” exactly? What is its appeal, its genius?
It’s easier to explain, first, what “The Road” is not, even if thousands of Amazon reviewers and the annals of Wikipedia beg to differ.
This novel is not about the apocalypse. A post-apocalyptic novel would bother to give more of an explanation regarding the apocalyptic breakdown of society as a whole, eventually leading to the sunless, ash-blown dustbowl populated by cannibals which McCarthy’s characters inhabit. The post-apocalyptic setting is a plot device, designed to create the sort of bleak, empty world necessary for this fable of survival and the parental love generated by a child – a stand in for the almost entirely absent love of god – to work.
Neither is “The Road” an environmentalist work. Environmentalism is only present in the book through its very conspicuous absence and from an omnipresent cultural idea that absolute destruction will ultimately come from human hands. While this idea holds as far as the cannibalism and violence of the survivors, McCarthy’s few and sparse descriptions of the apocalyptic destruction itself point away from nuclear holocaust and towards “dinosaur – slaying – justice -from -the – sky.”
What this book is is a little harder to say. This story itself is uncomplicated, but lends itself almost too easily to metaphor, allowing for a variety of interpretations.
The story is about a father and son, and “the love that sustains them,” particularly the father. These two characters, called “the man” and “the boy,” wander across a hopeless and bleak America in their struggle for survival. They are archetypal. The father, worn down from years of wandering, tells the son that they are the “good guys,” that they are “carrying the fire” even though he fails to believe it himself. In Freudian terms, the father is the ego, long suffering and living for a higher presence. That presence, in this novel, is the boy. Described as “angelic” and “alien,” the father explicitly states that “if the boy was not god, then god never spoke.” The boy is the superego. Where the man is concerned with survival, the boy is often shown expressing a generosity of spirit, an unselfish willingness to help others that is absent in the man.
Freud’s Id, lies in everything else: The barren landscape, the hollow shell of civilization, the survivors, who are regarded as little more than failing bands of vicious, wandering animals. The metaphor can even be extended to man and boy read as man and God, wandering together through a dangerous natural world. It works, because the very crux of the novel is the man’s utter dependence on his son, who is, for the man, the source of all the love left in the world.
As far as plot goes in the most technical sense, this book doesn’t actually have one. Father and son are on a journey to the ocean, in the hope of finding a better place to winter. There is scavenging and hiding. Many cannibals are encountered; one is shot. There is a half-eaten newborn baby roasting on a spit. Because the story is completely driven by the familial love of the two characters and their need to survive, the order of events is essentially meaningless. The “horror” of the post-apocalyptic world is emphasized only to compliment the tenderness between father and son. One questionable aspect of the novel is the author’s refusal to use quotation marks to denote speech. It appears McCarthy chose this method for its visual aesthetic, but it remains a device meant to increase the books sense of profundity.
McCarthy’s writing has been compared to Hemmingway and Falkner. His sentences are short and sharp. They are deconstructions of longer, masterfully rendered phrases that create a tone of anticipation without leaving the reader stumbling over the words. The narrative itself is rendered from a firmly masculine point of view and as a result, the domesticity of the father and son appears a little unnatural – an idea that is re-enforced though the novels’ setting. Female characters and female “aspects” or archetypes are mostly missing from “The Road.” The only female characters are the man’s dead wife, who committed suicide and abandoned her family, the vague nurturing mother figure at the very end, and the countless “Lady Macbeths” who murder and eat their own children. An apparent uneasiness with “the feminine” appears to go hand in hand with the sort of intensely masculine consciousness imbedded in the world of “The Road.”
“The Road” is a powerful piece of fiction which turns the sort of plot commonly found in movie or videogame and distills it into a distinct emotional essence, rendered by McCarthy with surprising earnestness. It raises many questions and answers none, least of all, “What the hell did I just read?”