The Road

Cormac McCarthy

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 1-77

Pages 77-175

Pages 175-287

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Symbols & Motifs

Dreams

“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,” says the man to the boy (189). The Road is punctuated by dreams that serve as mental barometers for the survivability and mental health of the characters, and the author does little to undermine or complicate his leading character’s distrust of dreams and fantasy. When the characters are healthy and at full alert, they wake screaming in the middle of the night with terror of vast, unnamed shapes. When they become sick, they begin to dream of long-lost comforts.

As a genre of writing fiction, realism has a surprisingly short history, going back only to the 19th Century. In every instance, realism is a reaction to any given era’s tendency toward fantasy, whether that fantasy is grounded sentimentalism or wilder speculative fiction. Consequently, realism is among the most changeable of genres, where one era’s hard-bitten pragmatism becomes the next era’s sentimental hogwash. Although McCarthy’s work is filled with real terrors, he punctuates his realism with moments of surreal, dream-like violence. His statements on dreams here serve as a sort of manifesto for his writing method and view of the world.

A Can of Coca-Cola

Nothing grows in the world of The Road, and the only food that can be had comes from the same manufacturing process that is suggested to have been at least partially responsible for the world’s end. With ingenious foraging, the man finds old cans and jars of preserved food, judging its fitness to be eaten through close inspection. The man’s technocratic knowledge of what food spoilage looks like within a bulging, suspect can, added to his social knowledge of where food might be hidden inside of a bunker or within the hold of a sailboat, is a far cry from the sort of knowledge an earlier generation may have considered essential to survival. Subsistence farming and well-digging are not possible in the world of The Road, and so the rotted skeletal shape of the social world is required to continue eking out a subsistence from scant remains of its former bounty.

In this context, the discovery of a single can of Coca-Cola, while an empty source of calories, is seen as a greater boon than finding a basement full of questionable jarred vegetables. In a world without life or light, it receives the ultimate compliment from the boy upon tasting it: “It’s really good” (23). This raises the question of whether the land really is barren, or whether it could be tilled and made to create life again; it is possible, after all, that the thoroughly modern man depicted in this story simply wouldn’t know how to grow food if he tried. Coca-Cola, then, represents the complicated and rich social world that’s disappeared, leaving the survivors to simply mimic the shape of the world within which they were designed to thrive.

The Fire

Throughout the book, the man and the boy are said to carry “the fire.” The exact nature of this fire is a question left open to interpretation. Fire is a common signifier of human civilization and its power of invention. Fire itself is literally such an invention, and its actual presence is often referenced in the text. The man and the boy travel from fire to fire seeking warmth and redemption, and in each case that fire is created and stoked by the man wherever they happen to be. Fire represents his mastery of the terrain and the responsibility the msn takes on in caring for the boy. By contrast, McCarthy emphasizes the boy’s inability to maintain fire. When the boy loses the pocket lighter, and later when he leaves open the valve to the kerosene tank, he marks himself as unable to carry on the sort of survival techniques his father has mastered and subject to the man’s fragile protective power. This becomes an important matter as the man begins to die. If the boy cannot maintain literal fire, the man has failed them both.

The fire, then, is deeply tied to interpersonal and familial bonds. It is not clear, however, that maintenance of those bonds can be extrapolated to the husbandry of civilization itself. Children are not only rare in this world, they are likely to be used as a food source, which is the most terrible and self-defeating sign of civilizational collapse imaginable. Yet the world which prevailed just an hour before the collapse described in The Road, a world presumably much like the year 2007—the year in which McCarthy wrote his novel) was run by an oligarchy of demographically old people. McCarthy belongs to a generation that saw unusual economic redistribution into the public sphere—in which food and housing were cheap and wages were comparatively high—and lived to see that public sphere recede. That gerontocracy now employs its own children for far less money than it already extracted from the economy in a world of rising competition. Such a world made it possible for McCarthy to extrapolate on the unimaginable image of fathers eating their children.