The Road and Apocalypticism
Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" isn't about the end of the world: it's about what life is like after the world ends.
The Road is a post-apocalyptic novel about a man and his boy traveling through the ruins of a fallen world as they struggle to find food and safety from roving maniacs and cannibals. After being published by Cormac McCarthy in 2006, it was also adapted into an eponymous film starring Viggo Mortensen in 2009. In an interview with Oprah in 2007, McCarthy was asked if the story was an allegory for man’s spiritual journey. His laconic, and perhaps coy, response: “I like to think that it’s just about the man and the boy.” Upon finishing the book, I came away with the impression that the book is not primarily about man’s spiritual journey, nor is it merely about the man and the boy, but that it is a prescient reminder of how terrible things will be if this clunking and stammering heap of human gears and cogs called modern society suffers a catastrophic breakdown.
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Review
Metropolis is a groundbreaking pre-WWII German film which criticizes the ills of modern industrial society. Arguably the most iconic moment in the film, the emblematic system breakdown scene portrays modern industrial society as an oppressive machine that breaks down and turns into Moloch, a god of human sacrifice, represented by a yawning mouth of fire into which slaves and workers are fed as an offering to appease its voracious appetite in order to restore the machine to its nominal state. The slaves must be dragged in by force, but the workers are so conditioned to obey that they sullenly march in martial rows right into the gaping maw of Moloch!
It has long been noted that all the world’s major religions teach that some kind of apocalypse is approaching. I believe films like Metropolis and novels like The Road are all productions in this tradition of apocalypticism. In chapter six of The Road, a dialog between the man and an old man directly speaks to this argument:
“How long have you been on the road?
I was always on the road. You cant stay in one place. How do you live?
I just keep going. I knew this was coming.
You knew it was coming?
Yeah. This or something like it. I always believed in it”
We may infer from this exchange that the old man is using the road as a symbol for existence as the foreground to a looming apocalyptic background. A common conclusion amongst existentialists is that man gives his life meaning by struggling to achieve a goal – even if that goal is absurd, as Camus elaborates in The Myth of Sisyphus. The road is a Sisyphean struggle: one must keep moving, one must keep striving to complete an unachievable goal because if one stops moving, if one stops striving, then one shall surely die. But why should one continue to endure such a tortured existence? In chapter six, The Road provides an answer: “Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
The madness of the will to live in an environment barren of all meaning – the will to live in an abyss – is the central theme of this work. As readers, and fellow travelers, we are constantly asking: “Where does this road lead?” The road ultimately leads nowhere; it is a road unto itself; it is an ouroboros consuming itself. The road is from nowhere to nowhere because in the fallen world there are no destinations: everyplace and everyone has been anonymized by the fall. A step forward is equivalent to a step back. It doesn’t matter how you travel the road because you are guaranteed to end up in the same place: oblivion.
The impotent arguments the man makes in his attempt to keep his wife from committing suicide, in chapter six, reveals that the man does not have any philosophical justification for staying alive under such circumstances:
“We’re survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.
Survivors? she said.
Yes.
What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.
I’m begging you.
I dont care. I dont care if you cry. It doesnt mean anything to me.
Please.
Stop it.
I am begging you. I’ll do anything.
Such as what? I should have done it a long time ago. When there were three bullets in the gun instead of two. I was stupid. We’ve been over all of this. I didnt bring myself to this. I was brought. And now I’m done. I thought about not even telling you. That would probably have been best. You have two bullets and then what? You cant protect us. You say you would die for us but what good is that? I’d take him with me if it werent for you. You know I would. It’s the right thing to do.
You’re talking crazy.
No, I’m speaking the truth. Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They’ll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you wont face it. You’d rather wait for it to happen. But I cant. I cant. She sat there smoking a slender length of dried grapevine as if it were some rare cheroot. Holding it with a certain elegance, her other hand across her knees where she’d drawn them up. She watched him across the small flame. We used to talk about death, she said. We dont any more. Why is that?
I dont know.
It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about.
I wouldnt leave you.
I dont care. It’s meaningless. You can think of me as a faithless slut if you like. I’ve taken a new lover. He can give me what you cannot.
Death is not a lover.
Oh yes he is.
Please dont do this.
I’m sorry.
I cant do it alone.
Then dont. I cant help you. They say that women dream of danger to those in their care and men of danger to themselves. But I dont dream at all. You say you cant? Then dont do it. That’s all. Because I am done with my own whorish heart and I have been for a long time. You talk about taking a stand but there is no stand to take. My heart was ripped out of me the night he was born so dont ask for sorrow now. There is none. Maybe you’ll be good at this. I doubt it, but who knows. The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself. I know because I would never have come this far. A person who had no one would be well advised to cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love. Offer it each phantom crumb and shield it from harm with your body. As for me my only hope is for eternal nothingness and I hope it with all my heart.
He didnt answer.
You have no argument because there is none.”
The man is motivated to travel the road by the sheer instinctual desire to survive and protect his boy – whom he calls “his heart.” The mother has clearly lost her maternal instinct to nihilistic despair. She has given up: she has spiritually stopped walking the road and now must suffer the consequence of stillness on the road: death. When you stop walking the road, it’s not a cannibal or madman that kills you: you kill yourself – as the mother did one night with an obsidian blade in the ashes of the fallen world.
I suppose I should comment on the various major tribulations the boy and man faced on the road, like stumbling upon a house occupied by cannibals and their human stock or encountering a gang of road warriors that nearly lead to their capture, but I did not find them very interesting because I was more interested in the psychological challenges endured by the characters and the details that lend themselves to the wider existential commentary.
A common theme of the conflicts with other travelers on the road is that they challenge the boy’s simplistic view of morality instilled in him by his father. The boy habitually parses the world into the deeds of “good” guys and “bad” guys. The boy may be said to represent the better nature – the lingering innocence – of the man himself because the man is amenable to the moral naggings of the boy in the same fashion as the influence of psychological complexes when they raise moral objections, i.e., the angel on the right shoulder. Like when the old man steals their cart in chapter six, the man’s natural savage reaction is to kill the old man by leaving him naked in the cold abyss after they find him walking down the road with their cart, but the boy, acting as the angel on the right shoulder, convinces him not to do so and to even break bread with the old man.
It may be asked if the boy was real at all. The wife in chapter six, as quoted above, tells him that if a traveler had no one to live for on the road, they would be well advised to “… cobble together some passable ghost. Breathe it into being and coax it along with words of love.” This is the same advice the man forwards on to the boy, as he lay dying, in so many words:
“If I’m not here you can still talk to me. You can talk to me and I’ll talk to you. You’ll see.
Will I hear you?
Yes. You will. You have to make it like talk that you imagine. And you’ll hear me. You have to practice. Just dont give up. Okay?”
Here we have evidence that the man is familiar with the art of using one’s imagination to invent comforting companions. Let us suppose that the wife of the man killed herself in that terminal night made less lonely by a plus one: the child she was bearing in pregnancy. This drove the man into madness, where he invented the boy out of sheer grief and desperation. The boy then becomes a necessary figment of his imagination because the struggle of maintaining his innocence while having to carry out unholy deeds in order to survive the road is his Sisyphean task that gives his life meaning in the abyss. He cannot maintain his innocence in a fallen world, but he struggles to try and this is what makes life worth living.
No matter how you interpret the work, it stands as a clear reminder of what madness and depravity lies lingering beneath society, waiting with a gaping maw to swallow up all that is good. Civilization is an externalization of our inner Sisyphean struggle which keeps us occupied so that we do not gaze into the abyss which our existence rests upon. The apocalypse anxiety that has always loomed over humanity is one of sensing that if we were ever to become aware of the foundation of existence by remaining still – on the road, – we would unite with it…which is to say that we would yearn to become nothing: we would wish for death – Freud called this the death drive. And we find a biblical expression of the death wish in Luke 23:29: “For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’”
Let us pray that no man must ever walk the road as the man did with his boy. And let us be thankful for the things we have because, as the last passage of The Road says: “On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in it becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again.” Once what we’ve inherited from the source of all things is gone, it is gone: it can’t be put back together again; it can’t be made right again.
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Your words are beautiful and evoke the same feelings I had when I read these books.