“You have set up a banner for those who fear you, that they may flee to it from the bow.” —Psalm 60:4
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the unimaginable has happened, perhaps across the whole earth. The reader learns of this through the eyes of a man (the Man) and his son (the Boy), and what McCarthy tells us through these two characters’ senses is stark. As with King David, who spent large portions of his life fleeing those who would take it, the characters are beset at every step—scavenging for the ever-more-unlikely can of food through abject danger from those who have learned to place all things below their own survival. Slavery, murder, and cannibalism are the tools the remaining few on Earth have learned to boost this urge to survive at the expense of all others.
But yet, there remains a banner of goodness, of hope, of God that barely remains. The reader frequently descends into disillusionment. Is this what might happen if human kindness descends fully into self-centeredness? McCarthy’s gritty prose sets the temperature of the novel throughout. Sparing with words, neglectful of polite punctuation, he serves up the most basic elements of a collapsed society. But still there are two who continue to hold the “fire” inside.
A Father’s Divine Charter
The Man—though he is one of the few survivors of the cataclysmic events that have destroyed most of the world’s flora and fauna—has a charter. He sees this as a gift from the God who has taken literally everything else away. Early in the novel as he scans the terrain for threats to his day’s journey down the cracking and bubbling interstate to the coast, he ponders this unclear but divine call.
“He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.” (p. 3)
The descriptions of this fallen world abound. I have a hard time imagining any author other than McCarthy being able to communicate something so unthinkable to our expectations of excess.
“The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief. If only my heart were stone.” (p. 10)
Or the tyranny of needing to search for food in forsaken places that have been multiply ravaged by bands of nihilistic scavengers:
“In the morning they went on. Desolate country. A boar-hide nailed to a barndoor. Ratty. Wisp of a tail. Inside the barn three bodies hanging from the rafters, dried and dusty among the wan slats of light. There could be something here, the boy said. There could be some corn or something. Let’s go, the man said.” (p. 16)
Of the sadness of what has been lost, the reader is given this to experience as the Man inspects the fireplace of an abandoned family home for anything that may assist his survival:
“He felt with his thumb in the painted wood of the mantle the pinholes from tacks that had held stockings forty years ago.” (p. 25)
Mastery and Purposeful Protection
Notable is the absolute mastery of the small, important things of the world that the Man has been able to demonstrate. McCarthy uses this, perhaps, as a foil to demonstrate how even the most competent and experienced can be beset by an evil world. Thinking here about King David in the wilderness. The Man knows how to survive. How did he learn this? Through good preparation before the disasters occurred? Through hard effort and good fortune afterwards? This remains unclear to the reader at the end of the novel, but what is made certain is that the Man has “the fire” to refuse to allow the evil to take him before he can develop his son into a Man who can survive the new reality. This book gives the reader much pause on the difficulties of the intentional protection and development of others.
Hints of Hope
The careful reader will seek out the hints that McCarthy provides of the persistence of the human spirit. They are few and can be missed. The Man takes some roadside cane and makes his son a flute as a distraction:
“The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin.” (p. 81)
And as the Boy struggles with the painfulness of his existence and his desire to take a blissful-appearing death—like his mother had quietly done:
“You can’t. You have to carry the fire.” (p. 298)
The Real Story
Though this book won a Pulitzer Prize, many reviewers have chosen to wallow in the meaninglessness that McCarthy is able to weave while describing an utterly fallen world. Even Haiti in 2026 has not yet fallen nearly as far. I’ll admit that it is a true challenge to see through all the depressing atmosphere.
But the real story of the novel is McCarthy’s knowledge that even in the worst possible case for humanity, hope will somehow survive. Some of the very last words are spoken in hope about the Boy (and perhaps others like him yet to be met):
“The breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time.” (p. 306)
The Road is well worth reading, even by more sensitive people. It speaks of preparedness, resilience, and the humanity of passionately holding to hope, even when the senses scream that hope has been destroyed and placed in its grave. Because then the spark is lit and who is to say what God will do with it.
Have you read The Road? What did you discover about hope in the darkest places? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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