Reading The Road, and Apocalyptic Fiction

Apocalyptic story telling has always captivated me. I think I own three anthologies of end of the world short stories. This is a somewhat embarrassing interest since it is a niche few writers can pull off well. Who, after all, has experience with the end of the world and how people act?

As it turns out, Cormac McCarthy seems to know people just that well. The Road follows a man and his son in the gray, damp, and ashen wastes of a world breathing its last. Few other characters besides these two exist in the book, save for savage, cannibalistic marauders and strangers secretively passed at night. One character, though, breaks into the lives in an uncannily potent manner. I encourage the read and will say little, but do want to share some of my reflections on the encounter.

The man--usually, but not always, a self-removed narrator--ponders in the text, "Maybe he is a god and he will turn us into trees." The line, as well as others in the episode, suggest a certain divinity, a sort of heightened reality going on, one enmeshed in mythology or spirituality or--what McCarthy seems to imply--simple but uncommon humanity that is otherwise ambiguous or lacking both in the book and amongst the audience. What McCarthy hits on in his post-apocalyptic tale is the simultaneous transformation, degradation, and elevation of humanity and character under such tribulations.

Some scenes are profoundly troubling, haunting in their suggestive horror. The man often attempts to shield his son from the markings of an increasingly desolate world, saying and later repeating that, "Once something is in your head it stays there." All the while, the boy and man adhere to being the good guys, distinct from the bad guys, who carry the flame. The episode alluded to above is obviously a manifestation for the boy concerning being the good guys. It, against the backdrop of decay and death, shines all the more clearly as beautiful and enlightened.

What McCarthy deftly expresses is what any setting like that of The Road ought to capture: In the presence of unforeseeable and unpredictable upheaval, it is possible to find humanity shine against the dark. It is obvious to the man in the book that his role is not just as protector and sojourner, but as sentinel to the light that most others--though living--have already lost. Such radiance casts subtle, remarkable, and beautiful hues around the setting; hues we are not always prepared to witness, but hues that we long for all the time.