The Road

The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable. A blackness to hurt your ears with listening. Often he had to get up. o sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees. He rose and stood tottering in that cold autistic dark with his arms outheld for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination. He took great marching steps into the nothingness, counting them against his return. Eyes closed, arms oaring. Upright to what? something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must.

Cormac McCarthy’s the road is the story of a father and his son as they struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. In reading it, I struggled to see the purpose in their struggle. The father and the son come close to death many times, and yet, after each escape they seem no closer to living. Their journey to salvation is a disappointment, ending the way things must: in the end. The father succeeds in protecting his son for as long as he lives, but no further than that.

The story’s commentary on hope was the most compelling to me. Despite living in a world where a violent death was the only certainty, the father refused to give into the dark and gloomy reality and future that surrounded him. He chose to pass on to his son the idea that goodness still existed, that life was worth living, and that hope, even if it was for the sake of hope, meant something. The difference between the world of the father and his son differs from our own only in duration. A hope that initially seems irrational becomes a type of the hope that we ourselves should have.

I really enjoyed this book, especially the style. The prose was often dry and spartan, but every once in a while McCarthy would flex his symbolic muscles and write a passage that was strikingly beautiful. In the style came the biggest expression of hope: while through most of the book the prose bores and disheartens, occasionally a ray of hope would shine and brighten the pages that followed with meaning.