Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Analysis: Graham Gordon, Emma Hoover, and Natalia Macia

Plot Summary

The Road by Cormac McCarthy is a gripping and dark post-apocalyptic novel that follows a father and his son, known as The Man and The Boy, as they travel south through a desolate, cold wasteland. The catastrophe that created this hopeless world is unspecified but is guessed to have been some sort of mass burning event in which The Man talks about blinding flashes of light. The father and son live in a constant threat of starvation, violence, and despair, but they hold on to each other, providing a way to keep going and continue fighting through their connection. In their journey along the road, which is what is left of old U.S. interstates and state routes, they encounter few people. Those they do find are cannibals, lone drifters, and robbers.

The novel opens with a dream The Man has. He is in a dark cave with a black lake and looks across the lake to see a creature with “alabaster bones” and translucent skin. This theme of seemingly mythical dreams continues to pop up for The Man.

In the wake of the burning, nothing is as it was before. McCarthy leaves much up to the imagination in terms of how many people survived, but from the constant description of utter desolation and loneliness, it can be assumed the survivors were very few. There is no longer any form of government, electricity, or technology, just survival. It is the opposite of a futuristic sci-fi apocalypse with new technologies. The most that is left over from the old word are bare bones necessities such as canned food, guns, knives, machetes, and gasoline or diesel that were left in vehicles.

It is known that The Man had a wife and The Boy was born shortly before the cataclysmic event. The wife refused to live in the post-apocalyptic world and raise her child in it. She committed suicide and tried to convince The Man to do the same and kill The Boy as well. The Man evidently refuses and only continues to persevere because of his love for his son.

On the road, The Man and The Boy only travel and walk along it. It has usually been ransacked for anything useful and is too dangerous to sleep on. At night, they bide their time camping in woods, on riverbanks, mountain passes, fields, a fallout bunker, and eventually a beach. One of the main pieces of old “technology” that is of importance in the novel is the shopping cart. Almost all of The Man and The Boy’s entire material lives exist within the confines of the metal cage of the old shopping cart. The other piece of old “technology” is the gun. The Man and The Boy are never without it and often The Boy takes the gun when The Man goes off to forage firewood on his own. The Man promises he will never leave The Boy. The Man taught him in the event of his disappearance how to use the gun to commit suicide.

As mentioned, finding others traveling the road was a rare occurrence, but many of the survivors they encountered, unlike The Man and The Boy, formed into groups of cannibals. McCarthy provides chilling descriptions of these people and the human prisoners they keep naked and chained up waiting to die as food. The Boy often asks The Man if they are the “bad guys,” and The Man always asserts yes. The Man assures The Boy they will never stoop to cannibalism and they will always be the “good guys.”

The Man and The Boy do see other people on the road, and eventually find one of the only named characters of the book, Ely. Ely is an old man, and in typical fashion, The Boy is desperate to help, but the man does not want to. In much of the book, one of the main differences between The Man and The Boy is how they view others. The Boy shows a sense of deep empathy, always wanting to assist others, while The Man has such little trust in humans he generally refuses. The Boy often finds a place, such as the waterfall, that he likes and asks The Man to stay there a few more nights, but The Man rarely listens to the boy. It is as if The Boy’s input can never be correct.

Eventually, The Man and The Boy make it to the coast, where The Man had said the ocean might be blue and the world better. But this was incorrect. The coast is just as much of a wasteland as the terrain they traveled to get there. The Boy is sad, but they still have each other.

Through the whole book, The Man battles an ever worsening illness, characterized by a productive cough. In addition, The Man and The Boy are constantly on the brink of starvation which is no help to one’s immune system. Finally, in the last stages of the novel, The Man passes away. The Boy is distraught, alone, and terrified. But in comes the man with the scar and what can be assumed to be his wife. This man offers to take in The Boy. The Boy does not trust him initially, but as this man tells him, it is either this or survival on his own, which is unlikely to last long. Eventually, The Boy goes with this new man and woman. The cycle of perseverance and finding home and comfort in others continues. 

Characters/Heroes and Villains

  • The Man: Key Character
    • One of the few survivors left in this post-apocalyptic world. The man is one of the two main characters, and his name is never disclosed. The man survives for his son and will do anything to protect him; as a result, the man has a deep distrust in all other people who still walk on this earth.
  • The Boy: Key Character
    • The boy is the other main character in The Road. He is the son of the man, and his age is probably between 8 and 10. Unlike his father, the boy feels very deeply about helping the other survivors that the boy and the man encounter on the road.
  • Ely
    • An old man, and the only character that has a real name. Ely is old and dying when the man and boy run into him on the road. The boy convinces the man to help Ely by providing some resources, but the man and the boy leave Ely behind as their journey must continue.   
  • The wife (“The Pale Bride”)
    • The wife is mentioned in flashback moments in The Road through the man. She chose to end her life, deeming her a symbol of loss of hope in a world that feels unsurvivable.
  • The Thief
    • The thief steals the cart of the man and the boy (which contains everything that keeps the father and son alive). When the man and the boy find the thief, the man wants to kill the thief but the son begs him not to. Instead, the man and the boy leave the thief naked on the road. The boy argues that they did in fact kill the thief because they took everything he had. The thief shows the contrasting perspectives that the man and the boy have on other survivors.
  • The cannibals
    • These characters are a symbol of “evil” and what is understood as “bad”. They are a large group that uses cannibalism as a means of survival and are a large aspect of the fear that fills the man as they travel down the road.
  • The man with the scar
    • This man finds the boy after the boy loses his father. While the boy is skeptical at first to go with this man, he realizes this man with the scar is one of the “good guys.” This man had been following the boy and his father for a while and was surprised how the boy and his father had made it so far.
  • The woman at the end
    • The woman is suspected to be the wife of the man with the scar. She is a strong believer in god and advises the boy to try and speak to god as well.

Setting

The Road takes place in an unspecified region of the United States that has been consumed by coldness, ash, and darkness. The narrator never mentions any locations or towns that the man and boy walk through, indicating to audiences that this disaster could happen anywhere while suggesting that denominations and monikers have gone extinct with most other cultural conventions. The man and the boy pass through woods, mountains, and ghost towns as they traverse south. They find a bunker, deserted homes, and a boat, but they never stay in one place for very long in fear that other people will find them. The only constants for the nomadic pair are cold and the seemingly never-ending road. As location loses meaning in McCarthy’s imagined world, the two main characters become a testament that a sense of home is not defined by a physical place or setting, but can be found in those one loves.

Timeline of Social, Political, and Climate-Related Events

  1. An unspecified event sparks mass burning and a vast majority of the population does not survive. The survivors that are described in the novel don’t seem to have any political or economic standing; the wealthy and powerful, it seems, could not even use their resources to predict or evade this apocalypse. 
  2. As remnants of society, law, and government crumble, some people (known as the “bad people” throughout the novel) form a cannibalistic group and target vulnerable people they encounter. 
  3. Most people perceive socializing with strangers as a death wish, thereby isolating individuals and destroying many people’s sense of humanity. Outside of the group of cannibals, most people travel on their own or with their families. The need to survive has dominated the need for socialization and culture.
  4. As a result of the mass burning, technology is deemed useless. Food and water are more coveted than any other item, and the primary use of gas is to create fire. 
  5. Many people, searching for a warmer climate and hope, travel south on the road. It is unclear if that haven exists, but that hope fuels people to continue on. The two main characters, father and son, follow this hope.

The Road and American Environmental Thought

McCarthy leaves little room for hope in The Road. American environmental thought, without deep consideration, seems to be all but absent in the novel. However, upon further examination, it is clear the influences and rich history of American environmentalism are present, just not in a plainly evident way.

There are two prevalent manners in which American environmental thought appears in the novel. The first is through environmental destruction and the meaning of home when a physical, permanent home seems to be ever-evasive and changing.

While McCarthy never includes what race the characters in The Road are, the arduous journey of The Boy and The Man are closely intertwined with the works of American environmentalism by people of color. In his “Landless Acknowledgement,” Nate Marshall details how climate change and environmental disasters disproportionately affect people of color, and because of this, people of color, in their displacement, have learned to find home not just in location, but in people and experiences. This sentiment is laden throughout McCarthy’s writing in the novel. The Boy and The Man can never settle down for more than a couple of nights in one place, with exception of the bunker. The entire world is burnt to a crisp, an extreme image of the types of landscapes Marshall writes of. But what remains true is The Man and The Boy are each other’s entire world. They acknowledge this. One of the pertinent questions The Road draws out of the reader is: How does one keep going in the face of utter despair and hopelessness? The answer is through loved ones or close friends. McCarthy, in The Road, whether intentional or not, invokes this concept from “Landless Acknowledgement,” that despite common American conceptions of home being tied to land and property ownership, home can be, like Marshall tells us, an often moving and transcending subject defined not by lines on a map, but by the human experience shared with those most dear to us. The Road also relates to environmental poems from authors of color. Martin Espada’s “Federico’s Ghost,” Rigoberto González’s “Unpeopled Eden,” Ruth Irupé Sanabria’s “Hiking with My Father,” and Lora Dee Cervantes’ “Freeway 280” contain themes of environmental harm and its effects on the body, food, loss of names and erasure of individuality, natural disaster and scars on the landscape, and perseverance through the loss of cultural and environmental knowledge. These matters exist in McCarthy’s novel. While not the same as a young boy being sprayed with pesticides and workers farming essentially poisoned land, such as in “Federico’s Ghost,” the desolate and barren environment The Boy and The Man live in throughout the book clearly has grave effects on the human body and its function. McCarthy’s writing is chock-full of descriptions of illness, hunger, and death, similar to Martin Espada’s writing. The loss of names and hence, individuality, such as in “Unpeopled Eden,” is blatant in the novel. It is always “The Boy and The Man,” “the good guys,” “the bad guys,” etc. Almost no one has a name, but Ely. The landscape is one entire scar in the road, drawing out similar feelings from “Hiking with My Father” and “Freeway 280.” Lastly, like in “Freeway 280,” there is a form of loss of cultural knowledge. All The Boy knows is survival. He learns from The Man, but there is no community and no culture for him to participate in.

The second, and less obvious way American environmental thought is contained in The Road is in the back-to-the-land movement. Whether it was the wilderness orthodoxy of early environmentalism such as Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir, or Ralph and Myrtle Borsodi and their moving back to the land, despite Ralph Borsodi maintaining a job in a city, the movement and idea was about escaping urbanization and capitalism by living in nature and providing sustenance for one’s self. The novel may not seem like it has roots in back-to-the-land, but in fact, McCarthy takes the movement and flips it on its head. Instead of making a deliberate choice to start living off the land, The Man, The Boy, and all others who survived the cataclysm that created the world of The Road were forced to go back to the land. Carolyn Finney and William Cronon, among other authors and scholars, criticize the inequity of the back-to-the-land/frontier movement for its elitism, sexism, and racism. It was a movement built for upper-class white people. It was highly gendered and ignored as Finney writes, that black Americans have a wholly distinct historical interaction with the land than white Americans. That history is steeped in racism, trauma, and slavery. Just as many folks did not have the privilege or security to go back to the land, The Man and The Boy too were powerless in their reality of surviving off the land. McCarthy took a flawed movement aimed at improving quality of life and subverted it as The Man and The Boy were forced to live like their primordial ancestors, hunting and gathering, not of their own choice, but for survival in a landscape of bleak misery swapped for the natural sublime.

Lastly, it is important to note that like much of American environmentalism, despite being impactful and well-written, McCarthy omits female characters as a central part of the novel. While there are a few, and they have contextual importance, they lack the significance of male characters in the broader scheme of The Road. Susan Schrepfer details in “The Feminine Sublime” how women played a central part in developing American environmentalism, environmental science, and outdoor recreation. The disregard for women in The Road and American environmental thought are both points of contention and future improvement.

American environmental thought is full of despair, yet hope for solutions, inclusivity, and progress. The Road leaves the reader with two possible outcomes of American environmentalism:

  1. American environmentalism failed to continue to scale up and protect nature and its tangential products and necessities from outdoor recreation to food systems to natural resources.
  2. Despite the best efforts of the movement, a grave environmental calamity was imminent and there was nothing that humans could do to stop it.

Imagined Human Actions and Solutions to Crisis

In the novel, any resource can only be used for survival, and no other commodity matters. The Road drives readers to think about resources and technology in a new way as they contemplate a world without modern technology and feel the overwhelming scarcity of resources available to survivors.

The connection between father and son, and essentially love, keeps driving the boy and the man forward in a world of desolation and hopelessness. While the man follows an “every man for themselves” mentality, there is a rooted sense of morals in the boy, who believes that a balance of good deeds and caution will carry them through tragedy. The two survive by taking on roles/duties, warming each other in the cold, and taking care of each other. Although the two characters sometimes differ in how they prefer to encounter strangers or solve problems, they share both love for each other and the desire to balance survival with being “good guys.” McCarthy imagines that human connection is, therefore, key to survival and creating solutions to crises.

Conversely, McCarthy’s more sinister imaginations of reactions/solutions to the apocalypse manifest themselves in characters like the cannibals. Although McCarthy imagines that familial love, caution, and care can carry survivors of a tragedy through the apocalypse, he also imagines that exploitation, violence, and selfishness help people survive. The cannibalistic group seems to represent McCarthy’s worst assumptions of human nature and action. Though the network and connectivity of the group are not described in detail, it can be assumed that they are constantly on edge, fearful of being eaten. Eating humans consistently and without remorse, the cannibals lose their humanity and become desensitized to their evil. The group, thus, is easily feared and hated due to their cruel and horrifying actions, but they live as a result of their willingness to survive no matter the cost.

Although the man and the boy are not similar at all to the cannibal group, they do share one trait with them: determination. While the man and the boy survive by scavenging, collaborating, and loving each other, the cannibals survive by killing, exploiting, and harming other survivors. Therefore, The Road offers two possible reactions to crisis: surviving for each other and surviving for oneself.

Broader Questions Raised by the Author

  • How, realistically, would humans react if government, culture, and society crumbled? Is it human nature to want to survive (at all costs) or to be the “good guy?”
    • How should humans interact in a world of hopelessness?
  • How can the human spirit continue in a world full of despair and loss?
    • Is love enough to carry one through the ultimate despair of the post-apocalyptic world?
  • What does it mean to be a parent? How can one be a “good parent” when they are trying to survive, knowing that their child could die any day?
  • What can humans do to prevent an apocalypse like this one from happening?
  • How can we find a sense of home when physical places become meaningless?  

Sources

  1. Carroll, Valerie Padilla. Who Gets to Go Back-to-the-Land?: Gender and Race in U.S. Self-Sufficiency Popular Culture. University of Nebraska Press, 2022.
  2. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. “Freeway 280” excerpted from, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
  3. Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness” excerpted from, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1995.
  4. Espada, Martín. “Federico’s Ghost” excerpted from, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
  5. Finney, Carolyn. Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors. The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
  6. González, Rigoberto. “Unpeopled Eden” excerpted from, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.
  7. Marshall, Nate. “Landless Acknowledgement.” Split Lip Magazine, 2020.
  8. Sanabria, Ruth Irupé. “Hiking with My Father” excerpted from, Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.