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.