The Road

“You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.” 

The primary characters of The Road interact infrequently with other characters, and the environment is almost purely hostile. Therefore, the only sounding board they have for reality is the man’s own fading memory of the past. Given the man’s pessimistic view of his own memory, this makes for a grim companion as he struggles to survive.

“He said the right dreams for a man in peril were dreams of peril and all else was the call of languor and death.” 

The only real rest or comfort in the world of The Road is death, and so the man frequently reminds himself and his charge of their responsibility to ward off it. The man’s dreams, frequently recounted, act as a good gauge of his level of alertness or despair. This quote also shows that not even dreams are able to provide solace for the man; to him, a good dream is a deadly distraction from the work of survival.

“But he knew that if he were a good father still it might well be as she had said. That the boy was all that stood between him and death.”

The man’s role as a father is foregrounded in The Road. It is provocative that these are among the mother’s final words to the father before she kills herself; in the bleak fantasy of McCarthy’s novel, men have not only the upper hand in survivability, but are the more self-sacrificing members of the parental bond. Moreover, the quote shows the ease with which a person will either die or give themselves over to evil amid this post-apocalyptic landscape in the absence of something to live for, like a child.

“If you break little promises you’ll break big ones.” 

In a reality as bleak as this, the idea that keeping oneself alive is unequivocally good may itself be a lie. When survival is paramount, humans are compelled to commit atrocious acts, like letting somebody die or even cannibalism. When the boy reminds the man of this moral code, which is more reminiscent of the old world than the new one, the man must keep close to hand the secrets he is not saying about the reality of their situation. 

“‘You mean you wish that you were dead.’

‘Yes.’

‘You musnt say that.’” 

Like the mother, the boy thinks about suicide. In this world, in which the weak are prey, it becomes the man’s job to defend against both external threats of predation and internal psychological threats. Yet ironically, it is the father who later suggests suicide to his son, suggesting that his mother was correct all along.

“They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I don’t dream at all.” 

Here, the mother creates an inverse of the man’s attitude about dreams and the ideation of self-slaughter, giving shape to the “peril” found in healthy dreams. She posits a third, worse option between dreams of peril and dreams of safety; no dreaming at all. Judging by the mother’s actions, such a dreamless state is a precursor to suicide. 

“This was the first human being other than the boy that he’d spoken to in more than a year. My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes.” 

The man kills the threatening stranger because he must, yet still feels a natural self-loathing at having to take a human life. The man acknowledges a debt of empathy for his fallen “brother,” though both men are equally reptilian in conflict. This also shows that the urge for human connection under these circumstances is so strong that the man feels kinship toward a threatening stranger who tries to steal away the boy, most likely to cannibalize him.

“Yes. Because we’re carrying the fire.” 

This is a phrase which is repeated but never defined. The most remarkable thing about the man and the boy is not the fact of their souls or of their Christian faith, both of which are in evidence, and both of which may be metaphorized by “the fire.” Rather, it is the biological fact that the boy has survived, representing a narrow path toward a warmer and sustaining future. The fire may also represent the “goodness” that the father and son seek to preserve in the world by being two of the “good guys.”

“I don’t know what to do, Papa. I don’t know what to do.” 

In this devastating scene, the man hands the boy a gun while they are hiding from cannibals and asks to kill himself before the cannibals get to him. This is the boy’s response. Throughout the novel, the boy will prove unready for the dire responsibilities of this world, such that the man must carry on as best he can for the two of them.

“There were times when he sat watching the boy sleep that he would begin to sob uncontrollably but it wasn’t about death. He wasn’t sure what it was about but he thought it was about beauty or about goodness.” 

The man, incapable of expressing affective emotional valence in the day, is plagued by terrors at night. At these times, he only trusts negative emotions and never positive ones, and so as readers we are instructed to view this positive ideation as a dire warning of what’s to come. This is also consistent with the man’s broader emotional responses: ugliness fortifies him while beauty makes him weep.

“But when he bent to see into the boy’s face under the hood of the blanket he very much feared that something was gone that could not be put right again.” 

Though the man warns himself against feeling, he seeks to stoke “fire” of his son’s soul by protecting it from trauma and taking the weight of the world on his own shoulders. This is the one protection the man cannot offer the child. In a world like the one depicted in The Road, a parent’s traditional role of shielding a child from trauma is impossible.

“Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he himself was an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not reconstruct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he.” 

The boy requires the man’s protection and shielding, and most of the dramatic tension of the book comes from not knowing whether the man will succeed in caring for the boy. Here, for the first time, the man begins to suspect that the boy may grow to be better suited to this world than is the man. After all, if the boy survives for years to come, he will have lived in this world of cannibals and deprivation longer than he lived in the pre-apocalyptic world.

“People are always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn’t believe in that. Tomorrow wasn’t getting ready for them. It didn’t even know they were there.” 

The character of Ely is an enigma, and his most closely held mystery is how he’s been able to survive for as long as he has. This quotation provides some answer; his power to survive comes from not caring. He has no obligation towards his future, and he is therefore able to respond flexibly to the needs of the present moment.

“When you die it’s the same as if everyone else did too.” 

The utter selfishness of this world is encapsulated in this statement by Ely. This is a world where nothing a person does in life makes an impact on the next generation, and where no act of selflessness goes unpunished. This quote also reflects Ely’s nihilism in that he believes that death leads only to oblivion.

“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 as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.” 

Every political, economic, and social system has an answering and opposite system beside it. These antitheses define and test one another on their way toward renewal and resolution. But in the world of The Road, in which ideological despair is total, the idea that another world is possible is as remote as an alien planet.

“He’d not have thought the value of the smallest thing predicated on a world to come. It surprised him. That the space which these things occupied was itself an expectation.” 

Here, the man considers a book ruined by water blight just before tossing it to the side. Many once-valuable things, like gold coins, hold no value in the new world, but books have a special valence to them. They hold knowledge and transfer that knowledge from person to person, and a world in which such things no longer have use is a poor world.

“Beyond that the ocean vast and cold and shifting heavily like a slowly heaving vat of slag and then the grey squall line of ash.” 

It takes the characters a long time and great effort to reach the coast, but when they get there, this is all they find. From this point in the narrative, nothing material will matter to the primary characters. The man will begin to die, and the child will have to find a new goal separate from the bleak horizon of possibilities.

“And perhaps beyond those shrouded swells another man did walk with another child on the dead gray sands.” 

The hope that there are other people on whom to rely is a very remote possibility for the man, who can only conjure such a vision in daydreams. That his vision is merely a reflection of himself and the boy is representative of the limits of his imaginative capacity. At the same time, this quote reflects the man’s profound hunger to remain connected to the broader spectrum of humanity that includes other “good guys” like himself and his son, not just marauders and cannibals.

“Every day is a lie, he said. But you are dying. That is not a lie.” 

This is a moment of clarity for the man, in which he realizes that his narrative-driving motivations were mirages and that the finality of death is the last truth he’ll really know. This self-abnegating philosophy is a current which runs through the tranquility of Buddhism but also the blackness of nihilism. In either case, it brings the man no peace.

“I will do what I promised, he whispered. No matter what. I will not send you into the darkness alone.” 

When the man fears his son will die of illness, he considers doing the impossible and joining him in death. Yet the novel suggests that one dies and lives alone in either case. The world itself is the darkness, and by the end of the novel, the boy will be sent alone into it regardless of what the man wishes.

“‘Those stories are not true.’

‘They don’t have to be true. They’re stories.’”

With this, the boy finally realizes that perhaps there are no good guys except in the motivating stories he’s been told by his father. Yet Cormac McCarthy ends his story with a wildly optimistic outcome whose details are hazy. As empathetic readers battered by loss after loss, the storytelling lie comes as both a welcome relief and a meta-commentary on how stories provide false hope.

“The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.” 

McCarthy enjoys peppering his mostly smooth and simple style with knotty but purposeful koans such as this one. Here the man attempts to take in the whole of the world with his dying eyes and sees nothing transcendent, just a “secular” world filled with silence. “Hydroptic” is a particularly grisly adjective in that it refers to hydrops, a condition in which an unborn or newborn baby becomes excessively swollen with excess fluid.

“There is no prophet in the earth’s long chronicle who’s not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.” 

These are the dying man’s final thoughts as he looks over at the boy. He has not found transcendence, exactly, but he does see in the boy a continuance, the “right form” prophesied by the continuance of humanity in one body after another. Yet it could also be just the man’s abandonment of lucidity.