We cannot give up, because we are the good people and we carry the fire.
by Odd Grimson
I haven’t read a work of fiction in quite awhile. Let’s just say that as the head of a family and being employed full time, my reading load has plummeted. On top of that, there isn’t much fiction getting through the censors that doesn’t reinforce the acceptable story lines these days: White men bad, everyone else victim.
The Road is a post apocalyptic tale (1) of a father and son escaping on a remote, glimmer of hope that a remnant of civilization is still intact, a remnant that the reader can easily intuit is no longer there. The father and the son carry around a lack of hope so dense that it seems to hunch them over in the readers’ mind as they protect their ‘fire’. The life force of the planet is ebbing away and the Man and the Boy, as McCarthy calls his protagonists, are forced to hide from cannibals, their own starvation and the worsening elements as they protect ‘the fire’ that they are carrying along the road.
The book is deeply disturbing in parts, but not in a voyeuristic or titillating way. Rather, McCarthy creates a back drop so bleak, which is necessary to imagining the two simply giving up: The total ecological destruction, the road gangs who have lost any shred of humanity and the sheer absence of comfort. Give up, though, is precisely what the Man’s wife (and The Boy’s mother) did. When the family set out on the road there were three bullets in the gun. These were to be the relief, if the horror of this existence became too overwhelming. McCarthy reveals such suffocating despair that the reader would forgive the man and the boy, if they did, in fact, give up. It would be easy for the usual English Department types to hold this book aloft as some warning of the damage mankind is inflicting on the planet, but McCarthy makes it about the Boy and the Man and their destiny to carry the fire.
All of their belongings they transport down the road in an old shopping cart having to cover up in blankets because of the ubiquitous snow and ash. The lush Tennessee countryside is turned into a black and gray wasteland of charred and falling trees and with tannin-colored water in pools in grimy creek beds. It’s a leaden world where the sun is obscured by encompassing clouds of ash.
If one chose, one could make the road represent life. The unexplained apocalyptic event could also represent the looming sense of dread that is creeping into our world which is filled with ethnic tensions, geo-political instability and the smoldering fear that the recent global economic crises are about to cause resources to vanish.
The Boy and the Man have an on-going dialogue throughout the story, during the course of which, the boy seeks constant reassurance that they are “the Good People” and that they “Carry the Fire.” He is the man’s conscience. He is a constant reminder that they cannot give up their humanity and become like the roving bands that haunt the road. The Man is driven by his charge to protect the boy. The boy is god and god’s word. The Man’s actions are not driven by his own selfish survival, but by a barely tangible hope that he can deliver the boy a future. For both characters the past is quite literally dead and gone and there is only the bleakest expectation of a future out there.
Their physical goal in the novel is the sea. Their arrival upon the beach is the final proof that all is lost. The author does provide one shred of hope for the boy at the end and I won’t spoil it for potential readers.
For the father, it is the end of the road.
Europeans and Americans, it struck me, are like the Man and the Boy. Our world is being burned away and cataclysmic forces like immigration, useless wars and the mis-education of our children are leaving our lives, towns, cities and countries in ruins. The memories of how wonderful things were are slowly dying. Like the Man, we have a duty to fight, forge on against immeasurable odds to secure a future for our boys and girls.
I read this novel several weeks ago and I simply can’t get it out of my head. It’s not like one of those airport action stories where you get the problem, the love interest, the resolution and you put the book down never to think of it again. The Road, I am convinced will stoke a fire in the reader to fight on. Truly a sign of good literature, but also a gnawing reminder that we must not lose our humanity, we cannot give up, because we are the good people and we carry the fire.
(1) The Road was released as a motion picture in 2009, November 25th. Trailer here.