The Road

I recently read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Here are some thoughts and impressions below that I wrote for shelfari.com:

Everything's gone. Indeed, we should be thankful McCarthy left us periods and commas to work our way through The Road. McCarthy's voice is perfectly fitted to tell the story of a world gone dark and dying. He does away with chapters, proper names, quotation marks, and many times verbs, apostrophes, and dialog breaks. The Road is dark and barren: a shifting desert of grey ash.

McCarthy consistently paints his post-apocalyptic setting, and then probes this world for meaning and sense. Can there be a meaning in this universal death, and can human emotions survive? Hope is necessary to survive, impossible to sustain. Human nature all but dies as the world collapses, and men become hunted and hunters of each other.

The single flame of light McCarthy holds against the dark is the love between the man and the boy. They are the good guys. They carry the fire inside. They need each other--the man provides for the boy, the boy provides a reason to live. Strife and the struggle to survive stretch this love thin, but never snuff it out. Against the relentlessly black setting, the protagonists' affection for each other does shine bright. But does it shine bright enough? Perhaps. It is a touching, warming, and very sad love.

Is it worth traveling with McCarthy down the road? The Road is unlike any path that we will tread, Lord willing, and yet at the same time it is the human road. The last paragraph tells us what we have always suspected: The Road isn't merely a post-apocalyptic tale, but a tale concerned with the brokenness and mystery of meaning in our world, too.

That said, I cannot except the end of McCarthy's tale: for whatever else The Road is about, it is about death. The earth is dead, mankind will die, and death will speak the last word of the last act. The Road is the conduit, the mysterious maze, of the dying. It leads to no rebirth, no afterlife, only death--the triumph of the cold and dark. The fire inside man has not yet been blown out. It still sputters and burns, but in The Road man lives in a world that has been broken beyond repair.

While I still believe in hope, and the glorious triumph of Light, I enjoyed walking down this road. Sin is dark, the human heart is horrible inside, and death is devastating. It's good to remember this, and reflect on it at times. Death has yet to be defeated--we dwell in its domain. We also should marvel at the miracle of life and love in our dying world. Sometimes you need to turn off all the lights to see the small flame of hope. The Road does this well.