Morality, Spirituality, Humanity

The Road certainly raises a number of questions related to morality.  I’ve already discussed one in other posts -- is it worth it to survive?  The question is first raised in the passage when we learn of the wife’s suicide, when she claims that the “right thing to do” is to “take [the boy] with [her]” (McCarthy 58).  The father keeps on surviving and later claims that the “good guys… keep trying… they don’t give up” (McCarthy 144).  Despite all the pain.  Despite the constant horrors.  Despite the endless nights of “…blackness to hurt your ears with listening” (McCarthy 13).   Was it worth it?  The father ended up nothing more than a “gray and wasted figure” (McCarthy 304).  The boy gets to go on living, but there’s not much to suggest his life will be any better with his new guardians.  Still, the story ends with a (relatively) optimistic tone.  McCarthy never seems to directly answer this question; he leaves it to the reader. 

Personally, I believe there are only a handful of things to keep living for in the world of The Road: the short moments of happiness or reprieve, the memories of the past, and the hope of a better future.  I don’t think that the short moments are enough to justify an existence of constant starvation and fear.  Sure, they find a nice spot by a waterfall and a bunker, but the omnipresence of so many horrible things, from dead infants to gangs of rapists, counteracts those brief drops of something better.  In addition, the book repeatedly brings up the idea that past memories and good dreams are incompatible with survival.  They’re “siren worlds” (McCarthy 17).  “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again then you will have given up” (McCarthy 202).   Relying entirely on past memories as a source of survival could be dangerous.  Hope is connected to birds by the ship they find.   Its name, “Pajoro de Esperanza,” translated from Spanish means “bird of hope.”  Notably, the ship is wrecked and rotting.  Earlier in the apocalypse, the father listened to “flocks of migratory birds,” but “he never heard them again” (McCarthy 54).  Their only hope of salvation, the sea, is “birdless” (McCarthy 230).  For the most part, hope has flown away.  What’s left is deformed and twisted.  For instance, the man from the truck gang had a “tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance” (McCarthy 65).  Getting back to the original point, I guess if you can find a way to keep hope alive and still survive, life might be worth it.  I’m not sure what I would do.

The father’s view of survival also connects to the issue of morality.  At first, he argues against helping people on the basis that they cannot afford to give up valuable resources.  For example, when they encounter an orphaned little boy, the father says “we cant… stop it… we cant [sic]” in response to the son’s pleading to give the boy food (McCarthy 90).  If the man that found the son after the father died had used the same logic, the boy would almost surely be dead.   Whether the situations of the father and the new man are identical in these instances is debatable (perhaps the father was running lower on food), but it still forces the reader to wonder whether it’s morally acceptable to abandon fellow humans.  This idea is raised on a more extreme and barbaric level when the father essentially kills the man who tried to steal the protagonists’ supplies.  The father’s heartless attitude towards others might have been part of what allowed them to survive for so long, but it calls into question how much of a “good guy” the father truly is.  McCarthy does seem to directly address this topic.  While the father is dying and becoming increasingly delirious, the “light [moves] with the boy” – it’s no longer emanating from the father (McCarthy 296).  If “carrying the fire” is what makes someone a “good guy,” then by the end McCarthy is saying the father has lost that status or never truly had it (McCarthy 86).  Between this development and the fact that the boy’s survival hinged on another person breaking the father’s code of justice, McCarthy suggests that even in the darkest of times we should continue to help others.

McCarthy addresses ideas beyond morality as well, such as spirituality.  The very end of the book offers a rather positive view of God: “the breath of God… [passes] from man to man through all of time” (McCarthy 306).  This is in line with the father’s belief that the boy is “good to house a God” (McCarthy 78).  As I discussed in my post about the characters, part of what keeps the father going is his connection to his God, which is largely facilitated by his relationship with his son.

Still, as the father gets closer to death, God seems to leave his view of the world.  He stands out on the road, looking at its “black shape running from dark to dark,” and hears a “distant low rumble” (McCarthy 279).   The author uses an extremely unique and uncommon word to illustrate what exactly is happening here; he writes “the salitter [is] drying from the earth” (McCarthy 279).  According to Barry Weber, salitter is a reference to the writings of Jakob Boehme, a 17^th century German mystic.  “Salitter, as used by Boehme, as used by McCarthy, is the essence of God. It is the essence of God which is ‘drying from the earth’ in this apocalyptic novel” (Weber).  This passage seems to suggest that the father thinks God has abandoned him and the world as he nears death. 

At the same time, as the father gets even closer to death the boy is back to being a “glowing… tabernacle” (McCarthy 292).   I’m not sure exactly what we are supposed to take from the father’s varying attitudes towards religion.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.  Overall though, I’d say that the major thematic take away is the positive notion that people can be infused with the “breath of God.”

This next idea is a bit of a stretch.  I’ve been holding onto this for a while, because I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it.  Frankly, I’m still not quite sure what to make of it.  When the apocalypse happened, the “clocks stopped at 1:17” (McCarthy 54).  I believe this is an allusion to Revelation 1:17 which reads: “When I saw him, I fell at his feet as though dead. Then he placed his right hand on me and said: ‘Do not be afraid. I am the First and the Last’” (Revelation).   If it is an allusion, it could be suggesting that the apocalypse was some sort of act of God.  Or, it could be related to the idea that God has abandoned the world, but will show up afterwards (as “the Last”).  Again, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.  I’m inclined to believe it is an allusion, because it just feels sort of doomsdayish.

My largest thematic take away from the book was its warning about humanity’s influence.  This is directly related to the motif of fire I discussed in my last post.  In summary, fire represents both the ability to survive and the ability to destroy.  In the most recent section of the book, this idea is continued when the father finds a flare gun.  Its original purpose was to help people survive being stranded, yet, in this world, the father uses it as a weapon: he shoots a flare which makes a “long white arc” and then he can hear the man he hit “screaming” (McCarthy 281).   The motif of fire shows that humanity’s actions can go too far if we aren’t careful.  In our world, that could refer to the environment, violence and war, or other concerns.  Regardless, McCarthy’s final message is a warning that the world is “a thing which [can] not be put pack… not be made right again” (McCarthy 306).   

Structure and Motifs (AKA: The World's most creative Title)

Many believe that one of the marks of good writing is an alignment between the structure of the writing and its meaning.  The Road is an excellent example of this skill.  The primary purpose of many of the stylistic elements in The Road is to convey the nature of the character’s existence. 

To start, the book has no chapters; it just goes on and on and on.  At times, the passages get choppier, which helps to slow the narrative down, but there aren’t any real breaks -- everything that happens just melds together, day in and day out.  At times, several days pass by in mere sentences.  This structure closely mirrors the lives of the characters.  Sure, there are some memorable moments (memorable can mean good, i.e. finding the bunker, or bad, i.e. running into a skewered and cooked infant), but for the most part their existence is one long stretch of miserableness.   The father hasn’t even “kept a calendar for years” (McCarthy 2).  What’s the point?

The melding of time and feeling of monotony generated by the lack of chapters is recreated on a smaller scale throughout the book.  The sentences are long and, at times, repetitive.  They frequently string together conjunctions instead of using punctuation.  Take a look at these:

“He untied the tarp and folded it back and rummaged through the canned goods and came up with a tin of fruit cocktail and took the can opener from his pocket and opened the tin and folded back the lid and walked over and squatted and handed it to the boy.” (McCarthy 173)

“So I hope that’s not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it’s not true.” (McCarthy 183)

“In that long ago somewhere very near this place he’d watched a falcon fall down the long blue wall of a mountain and break with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes and take it to the river below all gangly and wrecked and trailing its loose and blowsy plumage in the still autumn air.” (McCarthy 19)

Not all the sentences are this extreme, but ones like these are fairly prevalent.  In contrast, dialogue tends to be curt.  One person doesn’t usually say more than a sentence or a handful of words.  This use of shorter sentence structure reveals how horrible the world around the characters is (they don’t want to talk about it) and how social interaction has become frail and sparse.

Furthermore, McCarthy likes to squish words together.  I can’t believe it took me this long to realize it, but contractions such as “don’t” and “can’t” are crushed into “dont” and “cant” (McCarthy 183, 184).  Word pairs are combined into single words as well, such as “oldfashioned,” “ironcolored,” “workshoes,” and “eyesockets” (McCarthy 195, 208, 227, 228).  When used in speech, these abbreviated phrases suggest that the characters aren’t putting much effort into speaking – they’re just letting the words slide out and slur together.  On the other hand, when the phrases are describing the setting, they align with the illustration of a continuous and bleak environment.

At times, descriptive passages in The Road can seem like they only exist to generate a mood or atmosphere, but tiny details can be revealing.  For instance, the house full of cannibal victims has “white doric columns” (McCarthy 111).  If you google some pictures of Doric columns, you’ll see that they resemble bones – which throughout the story have, understandably, been linked to death.  In contrast, one of the more recent houses the protagonists find has elements of “Palladian” architecture (McCarthy 219).  Palladian architecture was inspired by Greek and Roman temples, suggesting a spiritual significance to the house.  In the story, it has food, is devoid of threats, and encourages the father to think about whether his ancestors are watching him.

One last thing I’d like to point out before transitioning to looking at motifs is a bizarre switch in the point of view.  The vast majority of the book is in third person.  However, on page 91 it switches to first person from (I believe) the perspective of the father.  I’m not quite sure what to make of this. 

Alright, onto motifs.  McCarthy’s writing is highly symbolic – understanding his motifs is critical to getting his meaning.

I feel that my general ideas about the meaning of colors from my first blog post are accurate, but some of my more specific concepts don’t really fit anymore.  For instance, there is definitely an aspect of the color blue related to false hope.  The ocean that they hoped would offer them a better chance at survival is “black… cold… desolate… [and] birdless” (McCarthy 230).  The boy hoped it would be blue (McCarthy 230).  If it was blue, that would indicate there was life and food; it would be reminiscent of the old sea.  But, that hope was unfounded and false.  Still, earlier I read too deeply into it being an indicator of an immediate threat or betrayal. 

Currently, I think blue and green together represent the illusion of a better world, usually the past.    When they find the bunker, the father “[ducks] under a lantern with a green metal shade” and sees “the richness of a forgotten world” (McCarthy 147).  Later, when they take a bath – an incredible luxury for them now – the only light is from the “ring of blue teeth in the burner of the stove” (McCarthy 155).  Neither of these experiences are permanent.  There’s some evidence of this meaning for blue and green in my original post as well.  McCarthy uses this motif to create a deeper meaning.  The father finds a Spanish coin with a “deep crust of verdigris” (McCarthy 217).  Verdigris is the bright blue-green coating which forms on copper when it oxidizes.  He has to “[drop] the coin and [hurry] to catch up to the boy” when confronted with the reality of “the gray country and the gray sky” (McCarthy 217).  “When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be… then you will have given up” (McCarthy 202).  To survive people must drop those dreams and carry on.

Fire is also an important motif.  The father believes they’re the “good guys” because “[they’re] carrying the fire” (McCarthy 86).  Fire is what keeps them warm at night.  It melts away the gray snow and its light seeps through the blackness.  Fires are the “dim and shapeless [lights] in the murk” that indicate to the father that there are (or at least were) other people out there (McCarthy 200).  Unfortunately, fire carries a rather sinister meaning as well.  The world is burnt… fire is what made it that way.  The father and his wife “[sit] at the window and [eat] in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and [watch] distant cities burn" (McCarthy 60).  Additionally, there are still “thin black trees burning on the slopes like stands of heathen candles" (McCarthy 50).  The impacts of these fires are everywhere, from the “figures half mired in the blacktop, clutching themselves, mouths howling,” (McCarthy 203) to the omnipresent ash.  In addition, the colors of fire, red and orange, are also the colors of one of the mobile armies of rapists and cannibals (McCarthy 95).  The contrasting depictions of fire raise, again, one of the novel’s central questions: is it worth it to survive?   The very thing that symbolizes and enables their survival is also what ravaged the world to the horrific state it is in, suggesting that McCarthy’s answer is “no.”  His answer could also be a different question entirely: does it even matter?

“Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and unremarked as the path of any nameless sister world in the ancient dark beyond.” (McCarthy 192)

A closer Look at the Characters

Let’s take a look at the protagonists, starting with the son.

Physically, the boy is scrawny, pale, and weak.  During this section he is described as “something out of a death camp… starving, exhausted, [and] sick with fear” (McCarthy 123). 

Despite his condition, he acts like a pretty normal kid at times.   For example, he has toys, like his “yellow truck” (McCarthy 36), and wants to help people, such as the man struck by lightning towards the beginning of the novel and the refugee boy they encounter.  His innocence and feelings of kindness makes him a very likeable character compared to all of the death, doom, and destruction everywhere else.  It also sticks something familiar to the reader, a nice kid, into the author’s imaginary environment, which can make the story feel more real at times (is there a name for this technique?). 

At the same time, he is certainly not straight out of the modern world: he wonders “where’s the neighborhood?” when his father uses it colloquially to mean “in the vicinity.”  On a slightly darker note, when asked if he “[wants] to die?” the son responds with “I don’t care” (McCarthy 88).  The son’s apparent apathy towards his death and existence raises a central question of the novel: is it worth it to survive?   His mother answers with a resounding “no.”  His father thinks otherwise.  Their son is a mixture of both of their perspectives.  Sure, he answers “I don’t care” when asked whether he wants to die or not, but, at the same time, he’s not killing himself or giving up and he keeps asking “are we going to die now?” – suggesting he cares to some extent about his death (McCarthy 92).  This could be an are-we-there-yet sort of question, but the fact that he keeps on going, even when starving, cold, and exhausted, indicates otherwise.  It’s also worth considering that “I don’t care” doesn’t technically mean “yes, I want to live,” (his father’s answer) or “no, I don’t want to live,” (his mother’s answer) its somewhere in between: indifferent.

               Moreover, the father is, understandably, the brains and brawn behind the protagonists’ survival; he navigates the maps, scavenges the countryside, carries or drags the boy in times of danger, and lights the fires.  He has impressive survival instincts.  For instance, seeing that someone had hurried past their camp during the night, he becomes paranoid and decides to“[leave] a maze of tracks” in the snow and backtracks to avoid the group hunting the fleeing person (McCarthy 109).  He makes the tough and heartless decisions to protect himself and his son, such as when they leave the man struck by lightning because “there’s nothing to be done for him” (McCarthy 51) and the people in the cannibal’s basement calling “help us” (McCarthy 116).  At times, these decisions conflict with the son’s desire to help those suffering around them.

               One critical aspect of the father is his unfaltering spirituality.  This contrasts with the world, which is described as “godless” (McCarthy 2) and populated by “creedless shells of men” (McCarthy 22).  He lashes out at God during his times of deepest despair (McCarthy 10, 120), but also attributes moments of good fortune, like when they uncover the bunker (McCarthy 146), and his son to Him.

He views his son as “his warrant” and the “word of God” (McCarthy 3).  His “job is to take care of [the boy],” a responsibility he sees as “appointed…by God” (McCarthy 80).  Certainly his commitment to taking care of his son is central to his behavior, whether that’s giving him the only soda (McCarthy 22), “[washing] a dead man’s brain from his hair” (McCarthy 77), or “[killing] anyone who touches [him]” (McCarthy 80).  Still, the boy is more than just a duty; he’s the father’s source of strength and will.   The father views his son as a “golden chalice, good to house a god” (McCarthy 78) – alluding to the Holy Grail, a mythical cup which magically provides happiness and sustenance.  Just like the Holy Grail, the son supplies the father with happiness and spiritual sustenance.  The son is also depicted as “God’s own firedrake” (McCarthy 30), a phrase whose meaning becomes very significant when the father’s explanation for why they’re the “good guys” is: “we’re carrying the fire” (McCarthy 86).  Without the “fire” provided by the son, the father wouldn’t be a “good guy” – his “sparks [would rush] upwards and [die] in the starless dark” (McCarthy 30) and he would be like everybody else.  His relationship with his son goes beyond love; it’s integral to his moral and spiritual being.  Should his son die, the effect on him would be catastrophic.

The Road in Color

  Well… this book isn’t exactly uplifting.  Sure, I expected the apocalypse.  I expected the death and doom.  I expected the roaming gangs of cannibals and mounds of dead bodies.  What I did not expect though was the use of the word “gray” literally once per two pages (on average) for the first forty pages.  Look at this:

               “The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing.  Gray slush by the roadside.” (McCarthy 15)

               “He sat by a gray window in the gray light…” (McCarthy 28)

               Really?  I get it already: everything is gray! 

   Or is it?  I decided to take a closer look at what exactly is gray in The Road.

               By an overwhelming margin, the natural world and light (especially that of dawn) were most frequently described as gray.  For instance, the “serpentine of a river” (McCarthy 4), “a reach of meadow-lands” (McCarthy 6), “beads of small… ice” (McCarthy 17), and a “shroud of mist” (McCarthy 38), are all gray.  Likewise, “the first… light” (McCarthy 2), “[the break of day]” (McCarthy 10), and “the… light… in the late afternoon” (McCarthy 28), are gray.  Everything about the setting, both the time and place, is gray, painting each day as “more gray… than what had gone before” (McCarthy 1).  The repetitive use of the word (unlike Cormac McCarthy, I’ll spare you from reading it again) illustrates the desolate and monotonous nature of the protagonists’ existence.

               So what about the other colors?  As one might expect from a story like this, the color black is prevalent.  It is frequently used to describe distant and foreboding objects.  For example, “the thin black trees [burn] on the slopes like stands of heathen candle” (McCarthy 50) and the gang truck’s “black diesel smoke [coils] through the woods” (McCarthy 64).  In addition, it seems to cling to everyone: the father has “black kid shoes” (McCarthy 11), the boy’s face is “streaked with black” (McCarthy 8), and the road’s “hot black mastic [sucks] at their shoes” (McCarthy 51).  Even the gang member who they encounter in the ditch is wearing a “black billcap” (McCarthy 65).  Perhaps the most vivid descriptions involving the color black are those about the darkness of night: “the blackness he woke up to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable… a blackness to hurt your ears with listening” (McCarthy 14).  I’m not sure exactly what this color means, but it is certainly not positive.  Maybe it’s something along the lines of horror or void?  Equating its meaning to horror would explain its use as a foreboding object and why it is always clinging to people in this world, but doesn’t really make sense in the context of “a blackness to hurt your ears with listening” (McCarthy 14). 

               You might think that white, being the opposite of black, means salvation or heaven or good or… anything nice?  Nope.  This is The Road: it means death.  His dead wife is described as “his pale bride” and has “combs of ivory” in her dark hair (another example of blackness clinging to people) (McCarthy 17).   Birch trees are given the color “bone pale” (McCarthy 11) and the eyes of the bizarre beast in the father’s dream are “dead white” (McCarthy 2). 

  The other colors aren’t any better.  “Yellow leaves” sounded kind of nice until I remembered the sentence before sticks those leaves directly next to “perch lolling belly up in the clear water” (McCarthy 12).  It’s also the color of the “mummied [dead’s]” teeth (McCarthy 23).  I’m associating this color with corpses and decay, while white is more the bones and spirits aspect of death.  Red is mainly connected to injury and wounds, but it’s also the color of a ham they find and consume (could be an eerie connection to cannibalism). 

               Blue seems to represent false hope.  As the father snaps out of day dream where “the sky [is] aching blue,” he reflects that he is “learning to wake himself from just such siren worlds,” associating the color blue with an allusion to sirens – who , in Greek mythology, would lure sailors into rocks and drown them (McCarthy 17).  The father also recalls seeing a falcon which “[falls] down the long blue wall of a mountain and [breaks] with the keel of its breastbone the midmost from a flight of cranes” (McCarthy 19). The crane is taking off towards some distant goal, probably with a sense of safety and confidence, only to be obliterated by something it could not predict.  The gang member the protagonists encounter in the ditch is wearing “filthy blue overalls” and attempts to convince them that he means them no harm, only to pull a knife on the son a moment later (McCarthy 65).  Beware the blue.

               There are a couple of inferences which can be made using knowledge of these motifs.  The boy is described as “ghostly pale,” but he is still alive (McCarthy 44).  This could mean that he is weak and frail (close to death) or it could foreshadow his death.  I’m inclined to believe the latter, especially after the protagonists’ conversation on page 9 where they discuss the son’s death and the impact it would have on the father.  In contrast to his son, the father is painted as gray; his heart is as gray as “raw cold daylight” (McCarthy 27).   I think this speaks to his resilience and willingness to endure the repetitive and desolate nature of the world.  It reinforces his statement to his wife that “[they’re] survivors” – she clearly wasn’t though (McCarthy 56).  At first the monotonous use of gray appears dismal and depressing, but, in this context, it actually has one of the most positive connotations of all the colors in the story.  I’d call that a silver lining.  Lastly, their shelter with the plastic tarp is depicted as a “frail blue shape… like the pitch of some last venture at the edge of the world” (McCarthy 49).  The protagonists’ encampment, and by extension their attempt to remain civilized and survive, is associated with false hope… RIP.

Works Cited

Boguszewski, Nate. Film still from The Road. Screenshot. N. Boguszewski Blog. N.p., 6 Sept. 2012. Web. 1 Feb. 2017. <http://nbog.us/zewski/blogski/2012/09/cormac-mccarthys-road-movie-and-pittsburgh-substitute-post-apocalyptic-america>.

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. Vintage International ed. London: Picador, 2009. Kindle.

Revelation (also Apocalypse). Bible Hub. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Feb. 2017. <http://biblehub.com/revelation/1-17.htm>.

Weber, Barry. "Salitter." The First Morning. N.p., 19 Jan. 2009. Web. 23 Feb. 2017. <https://thefirstmorning.com/2008/09/11/salitter/>.