The Road 6

The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body."

49

These lines are spoken by the man's wife as they discuss her intended suicide and what she projects to be his future with their son. The wife rightly points out that man's drive to survive will be fueled by his love for the boy. In other words, in order to survive in the post-apocalyptic chaos and destruction, love for another human being is required. Someone who does not love another individual would be "well advised to cobble together some passable ghost" of a loved one. The way in which the man's wife describes how this ghost should be treated is exactly how the man treats his son. He shields the boy from harm and offers him "phantom crumb[s]" of whatever hope and sustenance he can find, whether it is an outdated Coca Cola or half a tin of canned fruit, and he constantly encourages the boy to survive "with words of love." His moral and literal survival depend on being concerned for the boy

The Road 5

"... there is no other dream nor other waking world and there is no other tale to tell.

On this road there are no godspoke men. They are gone and I am left and they have taken with them the world. Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was?"

27

The first sentence of this quotation alludes to the theme of narrative power. Only one tale can be told, and this tale legitimizes or brings to reality only one waking world ("no other dream nor other waking world"). The second section of the quotation offers a hint as to what kind of catastrophe might have struck the world. On the road that the boy and the man travel together, no "godspoke men" exist. The term "godspoke men" may allude to prophets, which arguably align with Ely's statement (see the seventh quotation below) later in the book. The prophets are gone, having "taken with them the world," which suggests that some kind of religious war has destroyed human civilization, or that whatever happened has completely destroyed the moral world, the moral principles that commonly are seen as religious values.

The final statement in this short quotation first places an emphasis on the importance of the present. The man also adheres to the importance of the present; he does not wish to be attracted to his dreams of false happiness, nor does he enjoy being affected by memories of his dead wife and past life. Those who seek the "never to be" entertain deluded hopes, the falseness of utopia, while those who yearn for "what never was" similarly maintain meaningless illusions; both harm one's capacity to focus upon the present, and in this aspect, they do not differ. If the resurrection or Messiah or nirvana has never really come in this world, if these are the only end times, there is not really any role for "godspoke men" anymore; this is the one, awful world.

The Road 4

"The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality."

75

The first sentence here indicates that the post-apocalyptic world has been reduced to basic elements, "a raw core of parsible entities," where complexity is a luxury. More sophisticated aspects of human civilization have been obliterated, and the names of such things are slowly being forgotten by the remaining humans, following the things themselves into oblivion. Such things include colors, types of birds, and certain foods. More importantly, fundamental truths and customs regarding human life have been lost. These perhaps include the capacity to hope, or to feel empathy, love, and altruism. These concepts, once "believed to be true," are in fact "[m]ore fragile than he would have thought," too easily lost in the new reality. Significant principles and the words that signify them ("sacred idiom") are forgotten and lost; the objects and concepts themselves cease to be. One can infer from this vision that the process of naming and storytelling lends reality to the object or concept being named and described, while in the absence of naming, memory, or narration, the object or concept no longer exists in a way that has human meaning.

The Road 3

"You have to carry the fire.

I don't know how to.

Yes you do.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I dont know where it is.

Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it."

234

As he lays dying, the man has this conversation with his son, who wishes to be able to die with him, but he tells the boy to persist, to survive and carry the fire. This fire, the kind found within the self, is a symbol of everlasting hope and human resilience. Instead of succumbing to the circumstances and resorting to evil acts to survive, the boy carries the fire and does not compromise his higher human morality. The boy demonstrates that he carries the fire throughout the book, since no matter what horror they narrowly escape, the boy always seeks to help other individuals and never believes they should be hurt or punished, even if hurting others might ensure his own survival.

This allusion to "carrying the fire" may be more than a reference to the dangers of Promethean fire. It also might refer to McCarthy's previous novel, No Country for Old Men, in which one character dreams of his father carrying fire. "I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there" (No Country, 309). Human fire brings hope to confront the bleak future of the post-apocalyptic world.

To the extent that the novel resonates with the real world as readers find it, the message is the same: people like the boy always carry the fire. The sad truth, however, is that the world is all too much like the one in The Road, with far too many people seeming to choose self-preservation at the cost of genuine human concern for others. Our more complex world is not so simple as the tradeoff involved in killing others in order to survive, but McCarthy points out to us our human nature--the fire of human compassion is all too easily extinguished when we encounter adversity.

The Road Two

"Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child's pleasure the world he'd lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he."

129-130

This passage more explicitly describes the power of storytelling to create realities. The father tells his son "tales" about life before the catastrophe which has rendered the earth a wasteland to its survivors. However, to the son, these tales are hard to believe because they are so unlike the current reality. The father, having experienced the pre-apocalyptic world, is thus alien to the son, who knows only life after the disaster. The earth enjoyed by the man during his own childhood is a "planet that no longer existed" to the boy. When the man considers attempting to make this old world real to his son by telling stories about what used to be, he realizes that the story is too difficult and sad to tell; the whole story is a story that ends in loss. His son, perhaps, knows that the story of the old world ends with the present world, that his father's nostalgia cannot reproduce that older world unless the story leads them right back to where they are.

The Road 1

"He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

110

This vividly desolate passage reveals the utter indifference of the universe to the plight of man, a cosmic condition that he takes to be the "absolute truth of the world." The earth continues to revolve, "cold" and "relentless," indifferent to the sufferings of its inhabitants. Furthermore, the earth is "intestate," a word used to describe a person who has died without leaving behind a legitimate will. In other words, in its own death from whatever calamity has struck, the earth has left no future, no means of survival or compensation for its survivors. Even the sun is blindly indifferent in the midst of the "crushing black vacuum of the universe," which extends far beyond the human world of just the earth and the sun. Yet the survivors really exist for the moment, somehow. The hunted animals probably represent the man and the boy, living in spite of the universe's disinterest, witnessing this wasteland with their fleeting lives.