This ain't what Kerouac had in mind: Some rough preliminary thoughts on Cormac McCarthy's The Road

[Note: It's only fair to warn you, that if you are the sort of person who carefully avoids contaminating your thoughts with the details of a novel or the analysis of those details by others before reading a book yourself, that I go into an unusual (for me) amount of detail in this post about The Road by Cormac McCarthy; so if you're that sort of person (and believe me, I'm one of you), consider this your spoiler warning--you might wish to duck out entirely or come back later; the rest of you--those who have read the book and those who don't care--are welcome to spill blood--mine and/or the book's--in the comments. I hope this provokes discussion, as it is in no way a complete analysis of this fascinating novel.]

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There's certain people who can affect my reading habits by sheer virtue of being awesome. Jennifer Egan plugged Underworld, and suddenly the thought of attempting to read that doorstop again became a lot sexier. Maureen can take credit for once upon a time unleashing Infinite Jest on my unsuspecting brain. And for however much Cormac McCarthy's latest book has been or is likely to be reviewed, it was Steve Erickson who single-handedly convinced me that I needed to read The Road.

While I'm not as thrilled with the book as Erickson, I'm still pretty jazzed about it. McCarthy's stripped-back language lends itself both well and obviously to a tale of a world with so little left in it. There's a world's worth of distance between McCarthy's style and that maelstrom of language written by William T. Vollmann, whose The Rainbow Stories I'd read just before The Road. (Also I should note I'm not a follower of McCarthy, of whose work I'd only previously read All the Pretty Horses, which I'd found irritatingly repetitive.)

The story is about a father and son adrift in an empty post-apocalyptic landscape, one covered in a constant snow of ash that rains steadily from a colorless, sunless sky. Theirs is a story simply of survival and motion for the sake of survival and motion, the desire to go south to escape the cold tempered by the knowledge that nothing about what lies ahead is knowable and that any moment of the journey could end in their being raped, murdered, and eaten. The only thing left of America is a memory of states which no longer exist, skylines burnt out above the floodlines, and a single can of Coca Cola. It's bleak.

And that bleakness is chilling. While the story of our two main characters isn't one of pure hopelessness--as I've seen some reviewers say--it's at least 99 percent of the way there. I believe that if there wasn't that (even potentially illusory) one percent the father and son would have been dead before page one. Not much of a book left after that. Consider the absent wife/mother, who killed herself with "a flake of obsidian" some unspecified amount of time before the story begins. For her, not even the presence of others--the only thing worth living for--was enough to keep her alive. ("A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love.") For her, "eternal nothingness" is more desirable than a hopeless physical hell. She believes that without their son, the man wouldn't live on--though he seems to believe otherwise. He clings to some hope--or is driven by some fear. We never learn precisely which or what, though we do know as much that it rests on his son. We do know that whatever he hopes for, beyond mere additional days of life, he never finds it, himself.

But if others are the only hope, they're also the biggest threat. When the man and boy meet a member of a traveling caravan--one powerful enough to command a wheezingly functional truck--that other guy is "the first human being other than the boy that he'd spoken to in more than a year." The man shoots him dead in the forehead. Nothing good ever seems to come of interaction with others. The man gets shot in the leg with an arrow near the end of the book. The guy who shot him takes a flare to the face. They meet an old man in their travels, who trades worthless conversation for some of the pair's stores of food, at the insistence of the son. Another guy steals everything they own that's been packed into a single shopping cart. The pair takes everything back and leaves him stark naked when they catch him, until the son forces the dad to relent and leave the guy's clothes behind.

The son ultimately seems to be an argument for nature over nurture in a world stripped down to the barest notions of good versus evil. A world where good is you, and evil is every other person there is. It's hard to tell how much of a moral upbringing the boy received from his parents. The boy used to receive writing lessons, but those have long since lapsed. The man, who knows from the very moment the apocalypse hits--he rushes to the bathroom to fill the tub with clean water--that survival and self-sufficiency are everything anymore, is as close to emotionally equipped to deal with an amoral world as anybody can be without becoming evil. The boy, on the other hand, is constantly thinking of the needs of others. He thinks he sees a boy in a house; the image of that boy, alone, haunts him for the rest of the book. Likewise his insistence on helping the other people they meet, insistences to which the father only occasionally accedes.

While the father and son recognize the difference between good guys and bad guys, it's hard to believe the boy has ever met good guys other than his parents during his brief life. We know the boy knows nothing but the world created by the cataclysm because, in one of the book's most stunning passages, we see the "improbable appearance" of the boy born "by the light of a drycell lamp" in the violent time following the event; "Beyond the window just the gathering cold, the fires on the horizon." Everything, even birth, is already makeshift and detached from everybody else. "Gloves meant for dishwashing"; the man "cut the cord with kitchen shears." We know that some violence has already visited the family since the boy's birth--the mother mentions the loss of one of their gun's three bullets.

That cataclysm, by the by, cuts all the power and stops the clocks at 1:17. Maybe I'm over-reaching, but: see also Genesis 1:17. It's the central verse of the fourth day of creation, the addition of light to the world--"And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth". In the same paragraph there's a "rose glow in the windowpane" and the revelation that the wife was still pregnant with the boy at that moment, her own--and, quite possibly, the world's--final act of creation.

Is the boy, then, an argument for the existence of something good that remains inherent in the human construction? Or is he rather an idiot, retreating from the truth of the world into which he's been thrust, creating his own delusions to do so? Hard to say but worth further consideration, especially considering the fact that the battle between good and evil seem very much on McCarthy's mind throughout the text.

The sparseness of the story, the text, and the world it describes gives an additional symbolic weight to nearly every item or event related. Perhaps the most constantly present thing, then, which must be worth considering, is fire; note that the world and its people have shifted immediately into what may as well be a second stone-age, one in which fire isn't something that must be discovered, but which must be cherished and protected for all its worth. The world is a cold place, and the loss of a single butane lighter can mean the difference between life and death. This is ironic in that the cataclysm either was the world burning itself up, or immediately resulted in the world's burning itself up. Everything left is covered in the ash of that fire, one which seems to have taken most of the good wood and healthy trees with it. The fuel for fire is running out fast.

Fire as death and life is nothing new in itself. But note that we get fairly few glimpses of the world before the cataclysm--the closest we come is those few flash backs to the boy's birth and the mother's death in the days following the event. Note that we're never told what the cataclysm was. We don't know if it was a strike from a war, or a bizarre natural phenomenon. One possible hint of the potential hope in the father's mind is our realization that it's unclear whether this is a world-wide phenomenon. The oceans aren't blue and nothing lives there anymore--they've become a "vast salt sepulchre"; but there's a limit to how far past the land they can see, once they reach the beaches. ("He thought there could be deathships out there yet, drifting with their lolling rags of sail. Or life in the deep. Great squid propelling themselves over the floor of the sea in the cold darkness.... And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands.")

With all that in mind, a dream-memory of the father's, from his life when he was younger, beckons us, and possibly hints at some way of interpreting events. (And, well, plus, it's plain fascinating, and poetic, and enthralling, and will be a joy to type out myself.)

Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men. The boy's age. A little older. Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number. Collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers.

Thoughts on this:

1. First off, god, that's magic prose.


2. I can't help but picture this microcosm of burning snakes as being a parallel to the macrocosmic burning of the world. If cities (cities which burned, in the wake of the apocalypse) aren't, in their essences, people "collected there for a common warmth," then what are they?


3. Plus the burning is presaged by an exposure to light. Like the light present in the only description of the cataclysm itself: "A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions."


4. But not all people are evil, right? And snakes aren't really evil. Some snakes, they carry the fire into the dark, to illuminate those areas. It's hard not to think of that spiritual or metaphorical fire that the father and son carry and share between themselves towards a dark, unknown place; also hard not to think of the literal fire they carry, the lighter, the one they lose and the one they find.


5. It's hard not to think, suspect at least, this indicates ill-will and apathy on someone's part, as if those men burning snakes stand in for the men in what were once governments which burned the world out. Or that they stand in for a cold, uncaring universe, one that'll do what's to be done before doing what else is to be done, no relation between the two.


6. And presumably the man took some of this old world forward with him. He knows about the difference between good and evil. He knows by example and image. It's something the boy has, we can only assume, a vastly different experience and understanding of.

But so the man knows evil can be fought, even if just in a symbolic way; his hope, then, might have never been anything more than a desire to triumph, to truly be the good guy, to win. To find someplace better for his son to be and to live. His hope's unrealizable, not in the cold hard world he walks through and dies in, in a nowhere as close to anywhere as he's been. ("How does the never to be differ from what never was?")

As for the boy--the safety the father delivers him to, without ever seeing it himself. How long will that last? How true is it? As promising as it seems, the foreboding final paragraph describing those brook trout seems less than assuring. ("On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.") That "vermiculate" is especially chilling, with its evocation of an image of worms. (Snakes, anybody?) And finally, mystery is great--in a world with people left to appreciate it. What of a world without witnesses?