McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. 256 pp. Jason Craig
aegis 2007 162
McCarthy’s position as one of the greatest living American novelists is solidified by this latest and darkest in a long line of novels that explore wandering people seeking an identity and purpose in a universe of brutal violence, of utter meaninglessness. In many of his novels, such as Blood Meridian, McCarthy explores the darkness at the heart of humanity by setting his narratives around the clash between “traditional” life and modernity. Thus, in Blood Meridian, one gets the story of the Kid, a figure whose capacity for violence allows him to serve as a kind of template for the darkest vision of America’s “Manifest Destiny.” One in which it becomes apparent that all notions—classical and modern—of enlightenment and morality become subsumed by the march of a kind of blind, brute and amoral violent destiny/ nature. The Road, then, is the logical conclusion of these previous novels. In it, a man and his son are trying desperately to survive in a post-apocalyptic America. The details of what exactly happened are elusive, but this remembrance of the man about it sets the tone for the dark journey to come: The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What is it? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. He dropped to one knee and raised the lever to stop the tub and then turned on both taps as far as they would go. She was standing in the doorway in her nightwear, clutching the jamb, cradling her belly in one hand. What is it? she said. What is happening? I dont know. Why are you taking a bath? I’m not. (45) With each horrific confrontation, be it with sickness, starvation, sleep deprivation, or the roving bands of cannibalistic humans that use “the road” as their personal hunting preserve, it becomes harder and harder to not imagine oneself in the shoes of the man and his son. Their very existence in this world, their identities both within the novel and for the reader become complicated, blurred, and then shattered with each ethical choice they are forced to make. The Road, through its narrative and use of shockingly gruesome imagery, comes to shatter the precious façade of peace and complacency that so many of us perpetuate. It violates those easy distinctions between good and evil. And it calls into question what those terms can mean; especially in a world where the ultra-violent has become the mundane—the quotidian. The conversation between the man and his wife, who commits suicide, sums up this destruction of man-made notions of ethics very well:
