The Road (novel)
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 First Edition hardcover of The Road |
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| Author | Cormac McCarthy |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Knopf |
| Released | September 26, 2006 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 256 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0307265439 |
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. This haunting post-apocalyptic tale describes a journey taken by a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted years before by an unnamed cataclysm which destroyed civilization and most life on earth. As of March 28, 2007 it is being featured as an Oprah's Book Club selection.
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[edit] Synopsis
The Road follows a man and boy, father and son, journeying together for several months across a post-apocalyptic landscape several years after a great cataclysm (which is unspecified, but has some of the earmarks of a nuclear holocaust or possibly a large-scale asteroid impact) destroyed civilization and most life on earth. What is left of humanity now consists largely of bands of cannibals and their prey – refugees who scavenge for canned food or other surviving foodstuffs. In imagery similar to prospective accounts of "nuclear winter," ash covers the surface of the earth; in the atmosphere, it obscures the sun and moon, and the two travellers breathe through improvised masks to filter it out. Plants and animals are apparently all dead (dead wood for fuel is plentiful), and the rivers and oceans are seemingly empty of life.
The unnamed father, who is literate, well traveled, and knowledgeable of machinery, woodcraft, and human biology (when confronting and threatening a cannibal, he is able to list several obscure portions of the brain, at which the cannibal asks him if he is a doctor), realizes that they cannot survive another winter in their present location, and sets out southeastward across what was once the Southeastern United States, largely following the highways. He aims to reach warmer southern climates, and the sea in particular. Along the way, threats to their survival create a more or less constant atmosphere of terror and tension throughout the book.
The father coughs blood every morning and knows he is dying. He struggles to protect his son from more or less constant threats of attack, exposure, and starvation, as well as from what he sees as the son's own dangerous desire to help the other wanderers they meet. They carry a pistol with two bullets, meant for suicide should this become necessary; the father has told the son to kill himself to avoid being captured. (The boy's mother, overwhelmed by this nightmare world, has already committed suicide before the story begins.) The father struggles in times of extreme danger with the fear that he will have to euthanize his son to avoid a yet more terrible fate -- horrific examples of which include in one instance the chained catamites kept captive by one marauding band, and in another the prisoners found locked in a basement, in the process of being eaten, their limbs gradually harvested by their cannibal captors.
In the face of all of these obstacles, the man and the boy have only each other (McCarthy says that they are "each the other's world entire"), although the man maintains the pretense, and the boy the real faith, that there is a core of ethics left somewhere in humanity – they repeatedly assure one another that they are among "the good guys" who are "carrying the fire."
In the end, having brought the boy far south after extreme hardship but without finding the salvation he had hoped for, the father succumbs to his illness and dies, leaving the boy alone on the road. Immediately thereafter, however, the grieving and seemingly-doomed boy encounters a self-sufficient and benevolent man who has recently been tracking the father and son; this man, who has a family including children, is a manifestation of the "good guys" the father and son had hoped for – possibly a member of one of the "communes" which are referred to without elaboration in the story. He adopts the boy, and in closing the narrative suggests that the wife of this man is a moral and compassionate woman who treats the boy well, a resolution which vindicates the father's commitment to stay alive and keep moving.
[edit] Opinions and interpretations
Some reviewers have found religious imagery in the novel, and point to the son's messianic role, seen in his spontaneous impulses to morality and worship, but visible perhaps as much in the father's expectations as in the son's fulfillment. The story's resolution, which has struck several reviewers as perfunctory or insufficiently prepared, points to a faith in humanity reminiscent of the Nobel Prize address delivered by William Faulkner in 1949. The resolution hints at, without necessarily endorsing, a faith in a God who indwells and preserves mankind, whose breath "[is] his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time."
[edit] Geography
The journey passes through towns and cities whose names are known but never named. The travelers apparently set out on their journey north of Knoxville, Tennessee, crossing the Tennessee River at that city. They notice sunken boats under the bridge there, a nod to McCarthy's novel Suttree, in which the protagonist lives in a houseboat community in that location.
They continue through Gatlinburg, Tennessee, across the Great Smoky Mountains – probably over Newfound Gap (elevation 5,048 ft above sea level; see below) – and through the Piedmont region of North Carolina. From there, they proceed southeastward to the coast, perhaps that of South Carolina or Georgia.
One rare specific geographical indication in the book is a barn bearing the painted legend "See Rock City". One published book review (that of the novelist William Kennedy, entitled "Left Behind," the cover review in The New York Times Book Review for October 8, 2006), apparently not realizing how many barns in the upper South recommend seeing Rock City, has relied on the reference to infer that the route in The Road must pass through Chattanooga, Tennessee; this is clearly impossible ("The pass at the watershed was five thousand feet and it was going to be very cold," The Road, p. 25).
[edit] Oprah's Book Club selection
On March 28, 2007 it was announced that The Road was selected as the next novel in Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. The announcement was met with shock in the academic community. "Wait a minute until I can pick my jaw up off the floor," said John Wegner, an English professor and former editor of the Cormac McCarthy Journal Online when told of the selection.[1]The selection was made especially notable because of McCarthy's reclusive nature. A television interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show is planned for 2007 and it will be McCarthy's first, though he has been interviewed in print.[2]
[edit] References
- ^ Julia Keller. "Oprah's selection a real shocker: Winfrey, McCarthy strange bookfellows", Chicago Tribune.
- ^ Megan Reichgott. "Even the reclusive "Road" author can't resist Oprah", Seattle Times.
