by AdamHat

Created on: February 21, 2009

The Road: A Reading of Hope and Survival in a Gloomy World?

Entering a post-apocalyptic world, Cormac McCarthy is able to focus on some finer details of life the journey: hope, survival, and fatherhood. The man in the story assumes a role that many readers could connect with: a parent bringing their child up in a world filled with evils and temptations. Readers could see it as a hunt, except; this time the hunt isn't just a game to manhood, but a necessity for survival. It is the hunt for purpose. The man exists for the single principle of raising his son to be capable of making it in this bleak and desolate landscape.

His purpose of fatherhood shows its strength early on such as in the following passage: "He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke" (5). This passage reveals on a theoretical level that the child's development, even in this destroyed world, is worth attempting to live a life in a bleak and destroyed world; death is not the answer. Now, in practicality, the latter option has its delights. "The hundred nights they'd sat up debating the pros and cons of self destruction with the earnestness of philosophers chained to a madhouse wall" (58). This, along with the rest of the flashback, enlightens readers to what type of world they are really in. There is nothing. If only for a moment their meager wisp of hope vanishes from the mind, the gap is immediately filled with thoughts of suicide. McCarthy says, "The thought of suicide is a great consolation; by means of it one gets through many a bad night" (Nietzsche). In this life or The Road's, using thoughts of death to calibrate thoughts of life does hold within it a certain ring of justification; the notion of suicide keeps the father and child in control their final and most desperate escape plan.

Now, they are theoretically able to continue forward, instilled with a faint hope that life is still worth a shot (which all people, even today, have to decide at some point) but they must resort to a primitive form of survival to manage this, scavenging. "The boy sat watching everything" (17). Throughout the story, McCarthy places those same or similar words, reminding us that the boy's only learning comes from his father. Morality, survival skills, and faith are passed directly from father to son with no intervention from a third party. Yet, traveling the road, their perspectives of good and evil are skewed and disconnected from each other: the father,

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