The Road: A Final Reflection

Howdy!
My name is Charlie DeCurtis and welcome back to what is yet another entry in my blog post series where I analyze Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. However, this will not be just another blog in the series. This is my final entry in this blog series . As a result, I would like to discuss what I interpreted as the overall meaning of the novel. Specifically, I’ll be discussing a key theme and idea that I believe drives the novel and what is one of the meanings Cormac McCarthy was attempting to make his reader understand through the novel. Without further ado, let’s dive in.

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Normally, at this point in the blog, I would discuss my feelings and opinions on the previous section of reading I had just completed. However, now that I have completed the novel completely, I want to share my final thoughts on the book as a whole and whether or not I enjoyed it. If you have read any of my previous blog posts, it is fairly clear that I really enjoyed The Road. But I’m not sure if I have really expressed to what extent. The Road has increasingly gained my favor, and now that I have completed the book and am looking back at it, I can easily say it is one of my favorite books I have ever read.  Despite it certainly being the most depressing stories I have heard, regardless of the media format, the way McCarthy executed it with the relationship between the father and his son resonated with me. In the end, I would absolutely recommend this book to almost everyone. I only say “almost everyone” as I would obviously not recommend this to someone who hates sad stories. In any case, on to the actual blog!

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Before I get too deep into my analysis of the overall meaning of the novel, it would probably be beneficial if I explained to you what I believe is the overall theme of McCarthy’s story. After sitting down and really thinking about it, I believe McCarthy intended to express to the reader that humans will do whatever it takes to survive so long as even an ounce of hope remains in them. Hopefully, by the end of this post, you will not only see where I am coming from, but will agree with me.

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To begin with, McCarthy pushes this theme of the story through a variety of ways. One of these happens to be through the father and the son. Hope is clearly the motivating factor for the both of them in the novel. The father keeps his hope that by making it to the coast, he will give his son a better chance of surviving. At the same time, both the father and the son have hope that they may come across people who will not murder and then proceed to eat them. While the father is more focused and hopeful on letting his father survive, the son is more hopeful of finding more survivors. One way the father keeps the son hopeful is by reminding him that they are the ones “carrying the fire.” Throughout the story, the father makes sure to continue to remind the son of this both when things get tough or when the son begins to grow doubtful of their survival. Even on his deathbed, the father reassures his son in this conversation:

“I want to be with you.

You cant.

Please.

You cant. You have to carry the fire.

I dont 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” (McCarthy 278-279).

As you can see, the father insists that the son must “carry the fire” despite him literally watching his father die in front of him. Even in his death, the father is pushing the son to keep going as he is the one who has hope and has to hold on to that flame. The father understands that it is the only motivation for survival in the incredibly bleak world they live in. The comment that the “fire” is especially important when you look at previous conversations and interactions between the son and the man. He has always asked questions similar to the likes of “[d]o you think there might be any crows somewhere?” (McCarthy 157). Even though they seem silly in the completely ash covered, scorched Earth, they show that the boy still has hope that there could be something left in the world other than just them.

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The man can clearly tell the boy has much more hope for the world than him, which in turn give him hope that the boy can survive. I know, it seems confusing that he gets hope from his son having hope, but it makes sense. Now that we have established the father and son have clear hope driving them, we can move on to examining how this hope drives them to do whatever it takes to survive. It isn’t really exemplified in the son as the father is the one dictating all of the duo’s actions through the story, so we will be looking at the father’s actions. Throughout the story, he constantly pushes the boy to keep moving. On top of this, you see actions such as the man telling his son to leave the boy he sees and refuses to try to help him. The son is heartbroken by this action and sees his father as merciless. However, the father knows that they do not have enough food to feed an additional mouth, so he must continue to move and leave the child to fend for himself. An additional example of extremes the duo reaches is eating burnt, rotten apples and little seeds they pick out of wet hay.

However, despite having this clear “whatever it takes to survive” mentality, the father makes sure the son knows they would never resort to cannibalism. While others may argue this contradicts the argument that the theme of the novel is that hope drives humans to do whatever it takes to survive, I disagree. The man refuses to reach a point of cannibalism because he knows it would break the boy. The boy’s morals were clearly much more intact than the man’s as seen in the scene with the man who stole their cart towards the end of the novel where he begs his father to leave the man with his clothing and shoes. If the man forced his son to eat another human, he would have broken every single idea he instilled in the boy. His son would no longer “carry the fire” and would think they became “the bad guys”. By refusing to resort to cannibalism, the man is actually pushing further than doing whatever it takes to survive by making sure his son keeps his hopes up. If the son loses his hope, he will lose his motivation to survive. And if the son loses his motivation to survive, then the man would have no hope left, leading to both of them having no reason to continue to try to survive and live.

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This actually isn’t the first time in AP Literature that I have seen the theme that humans will do whatever it takes to survive when put in the position to do so if hope is present. As my free choice novel over the summer, I read Life of Pi, a novel of literary merit by Yann Martel. In short, that novel told the story of a young boy named Pi who became stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger, an orangutan, a hyena, and zebra after the boat with his family’s zoo on it sinks. Pi goes to extreme measures to try to survive in those incredible conditions. However, Pi also struggles to keep the tiger, Richard Parker, alive. Richard Parker is the only thing that actually motivates Pi to keep moving and trying to survive. If Richard Parker were to die, Pi would’ve had nothing left to live for and would’ve likely succumbed to the depths of the ocean. The similarities are actually quite common when comparing the two stories. As I just stated, Pi keeps Richard Parker alive as he is his hope in a very similar way to how the man’s source of hope is his son in The Road. There are obviously many differences between the two stories (the extent of the situation, the acts they committed, etc.), but the fact that both stories show how humans will do what it takes to push for survival when they have hope is enough to connect the two novels. Both McCarthy and Martel pushed the idea of what would happen if you pushed a human to their worst points while still allowing them to have that hope they need to survive in what seems like a comment on the nature of humans as a whole.

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Overall, McCarthy pushes a complex theme on human nature when given hope through the theme/message of The Road in a very effective manner. For a final time, I would like to thank you for reading my blog! This blog series has been incredibly helpful for me in understanding what has become one of my favorite books. I really enjoyed the experience overall. Signing off for a final time,

-Charlie D.