In some ways, The Road is a novel about nothing more than what the title suggests: being on the road. It’s a family road trip novel in a post-apocalyptic world where that small town gas station is just as likely to offer succor as new mortal peril.
Cormac McCarthy’s main characters – an unnamed father and son – face survival challenge after challenge. Food and weather and landscape and cannibal gangs. McCarthy’s style, dominated by short sentences and repetition, reveals the monotony of this existence on the knife edge of life and death. Survival is hard, lonely work. The Road demonstrates the perpetuity of the struggle without becoming a monotonous read: long stretches of walking through the ash-covered landscape under overcast skies are punctuated by moments of sheer terror and exquisite joy. Like all good road trip novels, the point is the journey, not the destination.
Throughout the novel, both father and son reiterate to one another that they are “the good guys.” In a world where the odds are against survival, where death could come at any moment, this notion is a comforting one. The son, in particular, uses the phrase as a mantra of reassurance. McCarthy frames his protagonists as loners, as those who have rejected the tribalism that has stepped into the vacuum left by the apparently sudden collapse of society’s institutions and norms. Yet by calling themselves the “good guys,” father and son in fact underscore the tribalism their choices supposedly oppose. “We are the good guys” implies that the others are “the bad guys,” and that those people are less moral and less human. This implication becomes especially troubling when the protagonists use it as a justification for morally questionable actions. Cannibalism is a clear ethical no-go, but is killing a suspected cannibal allowable because he’s a “bad guy” who was going to kill them? The imagery of the novel, especially in its flashbacks, might also suggest that “good guys” really means “Christians,” further compounding the complications of the phrase and its implications. Are the father and son messianic figures? Or an end of days extension of the religion’s history of hypocrisy? A further complication is the ash covered landscape ubiquitous in the novel, which evokes the images of New York in the aftermath of 9/11 in which ash and smoke cloaked streets and buildings. If the novel posits “good guys” = Christians = moral superiority as its primary dialectic, then alluding to the event which largely ignited American Islamophobia seems problematic? One little phrase, but it’s so richly, delightfully complicated, and The Road yields no clear answers.
The Road’s ability to take a basic story and spiral into a series of complicated questions is what make it a masterpiece of modern fiction. By erring on the side of less specificity – McCarthy never provides the character’s names, where exactly they are, or even their ages – The Road’s meanings and arguments can be peeled back like an onion, revealing layer upon layer of savory analytical opportunities. The Road is deceptively simple, with its basic, repetitive prose and episodic structure. This ostensible simplicity creates space for the subtext of the novel to contain a rich, ambiguous world of ideas.
Like all good stories, The Road speaks to both the strengths and weakness of human nature and society. And, like all good stories, The Road functions equally well as an explicit narrative and the basis for further analysis. What you make of it, dear reader, is up to you.
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