THE ROAD - Cormac McCarthy

I just finished reading this book and I have to talk about it. I started reading it at 8pm last night and finished it before midnight. Afterwards I just walked around silently brooding about it and gathering all of its implications. If anyone has read this book, I would like to know your thoughts. I was most struck by the innocent and pure relationship of the father and son...but the underlying parallel of the story with human nature, which can be translated to any situation where humans exist (modern times or post-apocalyptic). Are we the good guys? What makes us the good guys? What is it that prevents all of us from becoming the bad guys? Is it innocence? Would the father have been a good guy if he didn't have the son to take care of?

I anxiously await anyone's thoughts on this stirring and provocative book.

Cythinia Ozick's The Shawl and the Road would be two great stories to compare. The reason I say that is because both deal with the ruthless survival mechanism.

In The Road, children are handed over to other families and recieved by other families as fodders for meat. The tribe with the orange banners are ruthless killers, killing other humans for meat, and for their own pleasure. But at the end, the father died with dignity for he really went all out for the boy. He died so the boy could live. It was very noble of the father to surround his life for the boy but what would become of the boy?

In The Shawl, the opposite is true.

While before I would decry that people should learn to live together or at the very least, die with dignity trying to protect the children or innocent ones from savagey, I doubt that after reading the Shawl. For what cost would it be to die with your children or be a keeper willing to lay down your life for others? It would probably cost everybody's life and would probably serve evil's purpose to choose to die rather than show yourself as selfish and frustrate the Nazi's plan for genocide. Why do that when you can live for yourself and others after days of work, live, and love after making a wise but horrifying choice?

I have not read the Shawl, but from your brief description it would seem to be similar to Sophie's Choice. Perhaps I'm a romantic, but it seems to me that its the legacy of humanity that we sacrifice ourselves and our instincts to preserve civilization, innocence and moral idealism. What is the cost to humanity as a whole if we make choices that show children what it is to be self centered and impulsive? Should there not be a legacy to pass on? Like in the Kite Runner (I know, totally different story) but still, there was that moment when the father stood up and faced almost imminent death for some stranger, simply because this was the right thing to do. This is the essence of "The Road" to me.

I would say The Shawl is a more ruthless version of Sophie's Choice. It is difficult to make these decisions because what if the boy went on to with a family that becomes more and more desperate and is forced to eat the boy who lost his protector and advocate. That why I feel that The Shawl is a better version, and possibly more realistic than The Road even if the Shawl is a fiction piece on the holocaust.

Sometimes it's the selfish person who goes on to carry on the legacy and perhaps when that selfish person grows old, he or she might be able to pass on the story to convince whatever remained of the survivors that war or evil will lead to harrowing horrible choices in life.

Thanks for bringing up the Road after I read The Shawl. It really make me think about characters' developments and the harrowing choices they have to make.

Of course you are right, there is no saying that all of that deep moral conditioning would prevail in the end. Kind of like making it to the end of an egg race and then tripping and landing on the egg. Who knows what real legacy will be passed on. Is it something within us then that helps us continue on, if we know that we are the "good guys" and that justice must prevail? What is it that appeals to people so much? Is it a small sense of order versus chaos?

Thank you for the insight, I wish more people would have commented but at least now I have another book to read.

I absolutely LOVED The Road for its poetic and unrelenting brutality.

I just had this overwhelming sense of space, wide empty space everywhere. Even in the way the words were laid out on the page.

McCarthy's vision of the post-apocalyptic future was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

When he writes:
"People were 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." [pg. 168]

I got chills. I love the way the future is talked about and portrayed and how it gives one the sense that the past doesn't matter once everything we've come to know has been destroyed. You have father and son marching ever forward with such determination and you have to wonder to what are they moving towards? Does the father even know?

And I suspect he didn't. Not really.

I'm just in love with his relationship to his son and how even in a world he seemed to have lost all faith in, the existence of his son and his desire to keep him alive seemed to mean there was some hope, however small, left.