ELACCL9-10RL2: Determine a theme or central idea of text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the
text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
The Road Theme of Compassion, Forgiveness, and Love
The world Cormac McCarthy describes in The Road is a cruel place. Compassion in this dog-eat-dog (or man-eat-man)
world seems all the more precious. Granted, McCarthy mostly associates compassion with the novel's child protagonist.
This taints the portrayal of compassion a little, aligning it more with naiveté than goodness. It's hard to maintain such a
cynical view, though: just when you think you've read the grossest thing possible, a character will do something really,
really kind. In this way, perhaps, the novel defines compassion pretty well: something not required but given.
For all the violence and gore in The Road, there's a beautiful love story at its center. Given a post-apocalyptic setting, you
might be imagining tough guys and scantily-clad women. Instead, we get a surprisingly tender story about a father and
son. In the novel, love survives in the midst of a chaotic, barbaric world. McCarthy also sets some pretty high standards
for love: these characters care for each other with a level of self-sacrifice and compassion that we usually only see in
saints. Granted, love is mostly limited to the family unit here. But perhaps the isolation of the characters makes love even
rarer and more precious.
Think About:
1. The only other decent human being in the novel finds The Boy at the end. This guy also seems a little scary,
though: he's got a shotgun, a scar across his face, a weak smile, and a lazy eye.
2. The Man has compassion for The Boy.
3. The Boy is a lot more compassionate than The Man. McCarthy often tosses in a religious phrase or two when he
describes him, e.g. "the last host of christendom," "I am the one," and "chalice."
4. In his interview in The Wall Street Journal, Cormac McCarthy says that everyday conversations with his son John
made it "verbatim" into the book.
5. Near the end of the novel, The Man whispers to The Boy, "I will not send you into the darkness alone" (339.1).
Soon after, The Man dies, but he doesn't kill The Boy, even though leaving him alone in the post-apocalyptic
wasteland amounts to sending him "into the darkness alone."
6. Neither The Boy nor The Man ever says "I love you."
Shoulders
Naomi Shihab Nye
Refer to p. 117 in The Road
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
ELACCL9-10RL2: Determine a theme or central idea of text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the
text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
The Road Theme of Violence and Mortality
Although Cormac McCarthy is known as a connoisseur of excessive violence, we think most of the violent stuff in The
Road is justified. McCarthy portrays a post-apocalyptic landscape where the scarcity of resources has driven the few
survivors to murder, thievery, and even cannibalism. The more sympathetic characters attempt common decency,
avoiding brutality as much as possible. A more cynical take on the book, however, would be that the less sympathetic
survivors aren't driven to malicious deeds, but that the absence of law and order simply allows the worst parts of human
nature free reign.
McCarthy once said that he doesn't understand novelists who don't "deal with issues of life and death.” Well, he certainly
practices what he preaches. Death is a constant in The Road. Its thorough inclusion in the novel almost gives it the status
of a character. (Some characters in the novel even talk about death as if it were a person.) The constant threat of death –
from starvation, exposure, illness, or murder – also makes the everyday stuff in the novel much richer than it otherwise
would be. Simple actions like eating, finding clean water, or exchanging a few kind words with another human being
suddenly seem quite extraordinary.
Think About:
1. Most of the survivors in The Road have turned to cannibalism and murder.
2. Some critics have compared McCarthy's book to zombie horror films like Night of the Living Dead (1968).
3. The Boy never harms anyone in the novel, while The Man harms quite a few people (though always out of
necessity).
4. Most novels only deal with mortality on an individual scale. The Road examines global mortality .
5. Even in the most degrading and squalid of conditions, many of the people The Man and The Boy meet on the road
want to stay alive.
6. Before The Man and The Boy start out on the road, The Woman commits suicide. She believes The Man and The
Boy should kill themselves too, since it won't be long before gangs of evil men rape and kill them.
Crossing the Bar
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Refer to p. 273 in The Road
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home!
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourn of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
ELACCL9-10RL2: Determine a theme or central idea of text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the
text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
The Road Theme of Spirituality and “Good” vs. “Evil”
The Road is a fundamentally agnostic novel, meaning that some characters seem to believe in God and others seriously
doubt God's existence. The protagonist of the novel flips back and forth on whether he believes in God. McCarthy himself
doesn't really weigh in. For long stretches, the novel's bleakness and horrific events might make the reader think God
doesn't exist or has at least abandoned the characters in the novel. Then a lyrical, hopeful passage will crop up and suggest
otherwise. Although the novel remains agnostic, it does suggest that the sacred might be found in other people – that even
in the worst of times, goodness is enshrined in the person you love most.
In The Road, there are actual groups of "good guys" and "bad guys," which is somewhat surprising for a work of literary
fiction. In the wake of a world catastrophe, though, goodness has all but disappeared. The protagonists sometimes use a
private language to describe goodness (e.g. "carrying the fire"), but goodness more or less means not eating other human
beings and not brutalizing those weaker than you. That may not seem like much, but the universe of the novel is so bleak
and terrible that even small acts of kindness seem heroic.
Think About:
1. The Man doesn't seem to believe in God, and society's laws vanished in the disaster
2. The mother commits suicide before she really has to engage with evil.
3. Halfway through the novel, the character Ely, in an attempt to explain The Boy's goodness, says: "Maybe he
believes in God" (238.10). The Man's response, "I don't know what he believes in" (238.11) doesn't shed much
light on The Boy's beliefs.
4. Try to unpack the Christian allegory of the novel.
5. The character Ely says some pretty wild stuff. For example: "There is no God and we are his prophets" (237.30).
6. There are some stunningly beautiful passages in The Road. Check out, for example, the description of the trout on
the last page.
Notes on “carrying the fire”
Deuteronomy 5:26
For what mortal has ever heard the voice of the living God
speaking out of fire, as we have, and survived?
If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world
on fire. Let the truth be your delight. –St. Catherine of
Siena
As Jesus said to St. Margaret: “my divine heart is so
inflamed with love for men that being unable any longer to
contain within itself the flames of its burning charity, it
must spread them abroad and manifest itself to them in
order to enrich them with the precious treasures of my
Heart”.
ELACCL9-10RL2: Determine a theme or central idea of text and analyze in detail its development over the course of the
text, including how it emerges and is shaped and refined by specific details; provide an objective summary of the text.
The Road Theme of Memory, Dreams, and the Past
Memory is something of a double-edged sword in The Road. The protagonist wants to remember the past, but when he
does, he has trouble focusing on survival. Also, by remembering the past, the protagonist feels he's altering his memories
of it, so he tries not to recall too much in order to preserve it. However, the setting of the novel is so terrible that the
protagonist really needs the sustenance of the past. Basically, The Road presents memory and the past as an unavoidable
conundrum: even though memory connects the protagonist to beauty and goodness, it only reminds him that those things
no longer exist.
Most of the "versions of reality" in The Road are dreams. McCarthy includes a hallucination or two and briefly makes fun
of happy stories, but he mainly focuses on the dreams of his characters. Good dreams act like mirages in the novel,
drawing the characters away from their harsh reality. Nightmares, on the other hand, reflect the terror they face daily. It's
almost as if the unconscious in the novel no longer harbors illicit desires. All the terrible things people could do are
already being done. Rather, the unconscious harbors suppressed happy memories, which the protagonist, perhaps
correctly, calls distracting.
Think About:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
The novel begins with a description of a dream.
There is a flashback to a memory of The Man’s childhood when he is fishing with his uncle (12-13).
The Man refers to dreams as “siren worlds” (18).
There is a reference to “those first years” after the apocalypse (28).
The trout passage at the end of the novel is shamelessly beautiful (286-287). Almost all of the memories in the
book have been The Man's, and at this point he is dead.
The Second Coming
W. B. Yeats
Refer to pp. 3-4 of The Road
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?