Cormac McCarthy: “God Is A Little Boy, And Also Trout”
(x-posted to The Valve)
I’ve just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which set everyone’s hair on fire.
As an example of style, it works; the book is criss-crossed by references to ash and the aftermath of fire, and despite the single-mindedness of the landscape, and the microscopic focus on the father and the son, the minimalism is a triumph. Literally, there is less to do in the postapocalyptic world than there was in the world of cowboys, and this is a help to McCarthy, who otherwise tends to spend a long time on the insignificant everydayness of craft. For example, he will describe how a horse is saddled, or how a cowboy will secure a gate.
The Road is a Christian parable; that is its most important quality, and its downfall. Another Christian parable is a waste of time; it would be more worthwhile just to re-read the Bible. If anything, the patent religiosity of the text made me realize for the first time that the “larder” scene in novels of scarcity (a more profane example being The Ginger Man) is actually a scene of communion, and sometimes also a scene of baptism, if there is an abundance of clean water.
Earlier this month, I watched Eastern Promises, which had a terrific baptism in it. I won’t be hungry for another baptism for at least six months.
Anyhow, the father and the son nearly starve to death. The moment they began to starve, I began to wait for the scene where they would find a tearjerking superabundance of food. It’s on page 123: the dinner of canned pears.
Over the course of the novel, the father struggles to keep himself and his son alive. Increasingly, the son becomes distant, because he rejects his father’s creed of kinship. The son tries to give food away, first to a little boy, then to an embittered old man, and finally to a thief who attempts murder. Angrily, the father says you’re not the one who has to worry about everything, and the son says, I am the one. I think he did not add “I am the alpha and the omega” because the apocalypse destroyed most of the good courses in ancient Greek.
The wasteland is actually described as “secular.” In the final scene, when the boy is adopted by good people, the woman begins to speak to him about God. The Son, however, is too busy conversing with the Spirit of his departed Father. The woman reasons with him that the breath of God passes between people who converse thus.
The final paragraph of the book is about trout, who mazily puzzle the hours in deep, remembering, mysterious waters. It is not clear who is speaking, since the father is dead. To McCarthy, the deep pools are rumors of God. His editor should be reprimanded, or at least subjected to small practical jokes. McCarthy’s editor, I mean. Not God’s.
I don’t think I could have Cormac McCarthy over for dinner. It would get awkward. Nervously, I would talk too much, and he would spoon the candied yams without even looking at them.
I recommend watching the trailer for The Golden Compass. In my dreams, that polar bear fights Aslan. I’m mixed in among the crowd, my fist around a wad of bills, yelling Faster, pussycat! Kill, kill!
Heh. I like it.
Still have yet to read The Road — I’m wondering, though, based on his other stuff, if it’s more about a nostalgia for the loss of a religiousness (or preference for the nostalgia etc) than about religion itself.
And trout are really important in Welch — either The Death of Jim Loney or Winter in the Blood, I forget which. Considering that that novel was an homage to Henderson the Rain King it would be cool if it could be linked forward to McCarthy too.
Well, nothing oversimplifies a beautiful novel about the human condition like calling it a Christian parable in the dismissive manner that has become the trademark of self-congratulatory Lit students everywhere.
Congratulations.
Basically I’m saying that you’re missing the point of The Road, but then this blog makes me think you and I read books for very different reasons.
Sisyphus,
It’s not such a large distinction, is it? Between religiousness and nostalgia for religion, I mean. It might be possible to write a book about “religion, but not for us moderns,” but in this book religion shows tentative signs of an imminent rebirth (thus the boy).
I loved Henderson the Rain King.
The Fighting Life,
Please do give your own impressions of the point of the book. It is entirely possible I missed the point; if the book hadn’t first raised my hopes, I wouldn’t have finished it.
You are obviously torn between rejecting me and my fellow “self-congratulatory” literature students, and explaining what you mean. I think the latter course is better.
The Human Condition is not one thing. To say the least, it is very interesting that a book about two people in an ashen wasteland would be a book about the human condition. Why should we see it in such oversimplified, zero-sum terms? There’s nothing wrong with writing a postapocalyptic novel, but the novel itself cleaves to what is simple.
“There’s nothing wrong with writing a postapocalyptic novel”
Oh yes there is. Tom Disch started with The Genocides, and look what happened to him.
Seriously, there’s nothing wrong in the abstract with any kind of novel, but the postapocalyptic one is one of the most likely types to be poorly done. Oversimplification is exactly the problem. Like an endgame in chess, obtained when most of the pieces have been taken off the board.
You’re right when you say the human condition is not one thing. But then The Road is not just about one thing.
What do we have in The Road? A father and son moving toward some vague point in a doomed and dying world where they hope their lives will be better. All around them people are doing horrible things, and they’re trying not to lose their grasp on some sort of moral code.
Now how different is that from the lives human beings have always led? The Road is a book about humanity and about moral choices. It asks whether our moral codes are just ways to get along in organized society or whether they serve another purpose. If society breaks down, should these codes be abandoned?
Good novels usually come back to these kinds of questions about how we choose to live our lives and the choices we have to make to do it. Thinking of The Road as a “postapocalyptic novel” is confusing setting for purpose. If it were as simple as that, or as simple as Christian parable, anyone could do it. But they can’t.
I think graduate students in Lit programs don’t like something like The Road because they want a book that analyzes well rather than one that reads well. Lit programs are running a pyramid scheme, taking people’s money in exchange for teaching them a mainly joyless way of looking at fiction that is only useful for a) writing papers that nobody but other Lit students and professors read, and b) teaching other people to be Lit students and professors.
Essentially, you’re glorified customers in the business of literary fiction. You have carved out a living for heaping criticisms on a craft you don’t practice. That doesn’t seem like a satisfying life to me, but I guess that’s why I’m not living it.
Not to get in the way of the value of literary studies argument, but I was a bit boggled by this:
“What do we have in The Road? A father and son moving toward some vague point in a doomed and dying world where they hope their lives will be better. All around them people are doing horrible things, and they’re trying not to lose their grasp on some sort of moral code.
Now how different is that from the lives human beings have always led?”
To take that last rhetorical question at all seriously, you have to assume that:
a) our world is “doomed and dying”;
b) but there is a hope for something better;
c) people are always doing horrible things;
d) but people want to hold on to a moral code.
That’s a very odd description of “the lives human beings have always led”. I am tempted to say that it’s ineradicably Christian, but I’m not really sure.
But it points out the problem with postapocalyptic novels. They seem to me to be poor universalisms. An individual writer, or any person, thinks “I am doomed and dying!”, and this is pretty much a true thought. So they write a book in which the individual has become society. Similarly with “people do horrible things”, it’s pretty universal to encounter such people, or to be tempted to do horrible things, but society is not universally composed of people doing horrible things. There’s something weirdly self-centered about it.
This is true: society is not universally composed of people doing horrible things. But neither is the world of The Road. To address your point about my assumptions regarding the lives people have always (more or less) led:
a) the world is doomed. I mean, ultimately we accept this, right? That the world will end and that’s out of our control? And, as you say, each person is doomed. One could make the argument that the world ends for each person when they die, that you only imagine a world that goes on after that point.
b) is there hope for something better than the world we have? Sure. It may be wishful thinking, but if that hope didn’t exist why would we plan for the future at all? Why would we try to improve the world we have?
c) people do horrible things. Again, this is not true of all people just as it is not true of all characters in The Road, but one consistent feature of human history is people doing horrible things to one another. They also help one another, but so do some of the characters in The Road.
d) people do want to hold on to some kind of moral code. Everyone has one in some sense, regardless of how different they might be or how we might violate what we claim to believe. Would you argue that there are people without any form of moral code?
I don’t think of any of this as belonging to Christianity. I’m not a Christian, but I have a moral code and a hope for a world that is better than this one (not in the afterlife sense, but the real sense).
I don’t see The Road as a book where “the individual has become society.” It seems more like society has become a society unchained.
Again, I think it’s a mistake to write The Road off as a “postapocalyptic novel”. If McCarthy were so concerned with this apocalyptic world, wouldn’t he have spent some time telling us how and why it happened, what followed, and what the rest of the world looked like? Really it’s a book about people trying to figure out why and how to stay alive. A postapocalyptic world is just the setting for it, providing unique and interesting challenges.
Plus, it’s very well-written. What else do you want?
“I mean, ultimately we accept this, right? That the world will end and that’s out of our control? And, as you say, each person is doomed. One could make the argument that the world ends for each person when they die, that you only imagine a world that goes on after that point.”
Well, no. I don’t really want to argue about the rest of this at this time, but no, people don’t generally think that the world ends when they die. Or rather, some people do, but there is a word for thinking this: solipsism. So this is getting right back to the weirdly self-centered quality that I noted earlier.
I didn’t mean that The Road is a book where “the individual has become society.” I meant that apocalyptic or postapocalytic books seem to be written by writers who have taken their individual feelings of mortality and solipsistically generalized them to society.
Lit programs are running a pyramid scheme, taking people’s money in exchange for teaching them a mainly joyless way of looking at fiction that is only useful for a) writing papers that nobody but other Lit students and professors read, and b) teaching other people to be Lit students and professors.
And we’re there!
Why is it that, on the internet, disagreements over whether a book (or an album, movie, etc.) is good or bad so often end up being about The Great Scam of Literary Studies? The amount of defensiveness is staggering, especially coming from people who claim to have figured out the whole swindle. I guess some people can’t stand the rudeness of actually saying why you don’t like something.
This is a remarkably simple view of the world. The question is a rhetorical one: of course, according to the logic of this argument, we should cling to moral codes.
Perhaps this is right — in a generalized, almost meaningless way, I agree with the sentiment — but it’s certainly not reflective. In real, complicated life, people change their views about ethics and morality over the course of their lives. Sometimes they become cynical or selfish; in other cases, they realize that their own code is immoral or unethical. Clinging to a code inherited from God-knows-where is not the legitimate practice of moral judgment.
Other works of the imagination, including the television show The Wire, deal with this issue in more complex ways. In fact, on The Wire, one character says “a man must have a code,” but it’s clear from the context that this is both true and not always a sign of goodness.
I find it extremely funny that you would attack literary criticism for being joyless while upholding the story of a father and a son marching to likely death through an ashen wasteland.
It is also ironic that you would criticize literature students for seeking novels that analyze well, while offering what is indisputably an analysis of the meaning of The Road. The fact that not all analyses are sympathetic to you is not a reflection on analysis itself.
If you disagree with something I said about “Literary Studies” then say what. I’m not exactly the first person to ever make those points.
And why would I get defensive about The Road? I didn’t write it. This guy said why he didn’t like it, then I said why I didn’t like his analysis of it. That’s discourse, my man.
I don’t accept any particular version of “the end of the world,” aside from the meaningless fact that eventually the sun will expand and swallow the Earth. At that point, hopefully, human beings will be made out of intelligent space platinum.
Not all people believe in Revelations, though it happens that I am more of an alarmist than most of my acquaintances. And I still couldn’t stomach the parable of The Road — or rather, I could stomach it, but it left me bored.
The book was beautifully written; it did read well. That’s not all I want from a book, but it’s something.
You could argue that each person drowns the world when he dies, but that’s not McCarthy. In McCarthy’s world, the father lives on in the son’s memory. The father is afraid that the son will die, and he’s afraid of the damage the world has sustained. He’s not overwhelmingly concerned with his own dying.
The Fighting Life,
Here’s one place to start, in response to your broadside against Literary Studies: criticism is everywhere. Never, in my whole life as a literature student, have I heard of the commentators on ESPN getting called out for making joyless, useless remarks about a game they aren’t playing.
Here’s the difference: sports commentators do something that people who aren’t sports commentators are interested in and willing to pay for, in one way or another.
How do you make a living at “Literary Studies”? Teaching it. That’s about it. People who aren’t in this field are not sitting around reading criticism. They just aren’t.
“People who aren’t in this field are not sitting around reading criticism. They just aren’t.”
I am.
“People who aren’t in this field are not sitting around reading criticism. They just aren’t.”
Observably disproved, FL. Lots of people pay for e.g. Harold Bloom’s books. For that matter, if we’re just talking about people who hang around on literary studies blogs, reading literary studies things, the list of regulars I see who aren’t in this field or even in academia at all includes me, Bill Benzon, Ray Davis, John Emerson, Daniel Green, Luther Blissett (well, he’s teaching high school)… I know I must be forgetting more people.
Exactly. Literally thousands of people visit The Valve daily.
Plus, there’s a fallacy in the way you’re presenting the difference between sports commentators and literary critics. According to your model, sport commentators come by their positions “honestly,” apparently because people are willing to watch them and pay them, whereas when people read, watch, hire, and emulate literary critics it is some kind of cruel swindle.
I’m not exactly the first person to ever make those points.
Ain’t that the truth. Does the fact that you’re repeating about five million other knee-jerk critics of literary studies give you some inclination of why I’m not really eager to engage you?
I think more than one fallacy has metastasized in this discussion. First of all, to call The Road a parable is to use the term loosely, if not irresponsibly. Webster’s Dictionary defines “parable” as “the area between the anus and scrotum or vulva.” But, if I remember correctly from Sunday school and freshman rhetoric, a parable is also a simple, allegorical story used to illustrate a moral lesson. My question for those who would dismiss (and I think the nomenclature is dismissive, ultimately) The Road as a parable is, how does it meet the three criteria expressed in the accepted definition of a parable? To wit:
1) In what regard is The Road characterized by that absence of ambiguity which lends simplicity to a parable?
2) Where is the semiological component in The Road that would make it allegorical? Can any symbolic map be drawn for The Road in the manner that, say, The Prodigal Son or The Cave can be mapped?
3) What is the moral lesson of The Road? The Prodigal Son ends with said son being welcomed back by his father, in a clean demonstration of moral behavior (on the part of the father, at least) generating concrete rewards. The Little Engine That Could, say, ends with a train achieving its personal goals through self-hypnosis — another moral behavior/concrete reward scenario. Can the father’s behavior in the road be ascribed to a singular moral virtue like those illustrated in most parables? Does he reap a reward besides death?
As for the assertion that the world does not end, somehow, after one dies: well, maybe not this world. But the world of a novel most certainly does. The modern novel, if you believe Joyce, is a record of consciousness. Surely the mimesis of consciousness enforced by narrative fiction necessarily engenders a finite world; on page 278 or so, everything stops. Blip. I think the metaphor relentlessly suggested by the very form of the novel must inflect the writer’s and reader’s constructions of death. Ain’t nobody going to heaven in The Road, is what I’m saying here. For me, that’s what makes the novel so beautiful: it is an attempt to examine goodness directly, without the carrot of good consequences or an afterlife to bias the examiner. I think it’s a good novel because it’s fundamentally non-Christian — hell, a-Christian — and to read it as the opposite seems poorly thought-out or uncharitable.
Why has the Christ metaphor become a cliche both of literary criticism and of criticism of literary criticism? Let’s not forget that the earliest lit crit may have grown out of the Vatican’s medieval practice of exegesis — interpreting secular documents as enforcements of church doctrine. “Everything that is written is written for our purpose,” said some pope I don’t remember because I was drinking a lot then. He founded what is, in my opinion, the ugliest aspect of literary criticism: the idea that any well-reasoned argument is valid.
It ain’t. Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath” isn’t about Mary Magdalene and The Road isn’t related to Christianity. If it is, where is the redemption from sin, wrongdoing or self-loathing? Who sacrifices himself to facilitate that redemption? Who is redeemed? Just because there’s a kid and a dead guy in it doesn’t make it the Book of Luke.
“As for the assertion that the world does not end, somehow, after one dies: well, maybe not this world. But the world of a novel most certainly does.”
Except for revised, later versions.
And sequels.
And fanfic.
And the differences introduced by translation.
And, in the most basic sense, the varied images of that novel in the minds of its readers.
Well, aptninja –
You’re really going to start a serious comment with a “taint” joke? Alright, I guess, but it adds nothing.
1) The Road has good guys and bad guys. As you all know, those are actually the terms the characters use.
The good guys “carry the fire.” The bad guys eat human beings. Of course, the good guys have to fight to survive, and the good guys have internal disagreements about how much generosity towards strangers is survivable. That in no way endangers the basic dichotomy.
2. Certainly a symbolic map can be drawn. This is a story about the salvation of mankind through mutual aid and selflessness; the re-discovery of religious faith goes hand-in-hand with the stubborn practice of goodness. Every major episode in the story revolves around these themes.
3. The moral lesson of The Road is that you should share all you have with others, for we are all members of the human family and children of God.
The concept of “reward” is treated in a very specific manner in the Christian Gospels. Matthew 5:12 reads: “Rejoice, and be exceeding glad; for great is your reward in heaven.” Italics mine; the reward does not come during one’s lifetime.
In the world of the book, the father’s reward is delivering his son to safety.
The book does have good consequences: the child is saved by the members of the commune. The book does have an afterlife: the child talks to the father’s spirit, and the book does not end with the father’s death.
He founded what is, in my opinion, the ugliest aspect of literary criticism: the idea that any well-reasoned argument is valid.
Look, I’m sure you had excellent hedonistic reasons for drinking while researching the origins of literary criticism, but it doesn’t make for a great argument all these years later. An intuitive sense of what a book is, amounting to what we’d like it to be, cannot hold a candle to well-reasoned, well-supported arguments.
Why throw in that part about Chaucer? Did you just want to be gratuitously wrong?
The son redeems the father: forgives him his sins, and assuages the father’s death drive.
I think the taint joke and the remark about drinking heavily do add something to the argument: bathos, which I thought was warranted considering the highfalutin language and general level of self-congratulatory pretension in my post. Apparently that stuff doesn’t need to be leavened in this discussion, though.
I referred to the Wife of Bath’s Tale because Chaucer was famously the subject of aggressive exegesis during his lifetime. He was known to deliberately construct texts that would lend themselves to religious interpretations to a comical degree (one was about a white sheep and a black sheep living together in an apple orchard) only to be thwarted by some incongruous detail.(It was Pope Urban VI, by the way, who went so crazy for exegesis.)
The incongruous detail in The Road is the gap between the diction the father uses to speak to his son and that used in his interiority. There is no mention of Good Guys and Bad Guys when the father thinks to himself, nor of Carrying the Fire; it seems more likely that this is language that the father constructs in order to comfort the son and inculcate him a sense of purpose. The deep vein of pathos felt in The Road comes, in large part, from the certainty of both the father and the reader that this sense of purpose is ultimately false. The father doesn’t think anything particularly good will happen when they get to the coast and neither does the reader. Metaphorically, he’s telling his kid that Rover has gone to live on a nice farm.
By this device, McCarthy introduces another thread in his investigation of goodness, and I think it’s one that is central to the project of the book. If we think that the father actually believes what he is telling his son, it becomes the story of two sad religious zealots. It doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels more like Sartre’s explanation of the existentialist concept of being “thrown”: cast into a world in which available value systems have been demonstrably refuted, mundane activities seem to lack meaningful purpose, and death is imminent. Part of the reason the Christian-allegory interpretation came as a surprise to me was because I found the book so weirdly existential.
I don’t think the moral lesson of The Road is about sharing with others, at least not in a way that parallels Christian thought. The father consistently argues against sharing, and they sure don’t set out to distribute food and supplies along the way. What good ever comes from their sharing? And surely many, many people in The Road are excluded from the numbers of the “human family” and “children of God.” There’s certainly good-hearted sharing in The Road, but not to the degree that such acts are emphasized in Christian religious writings.
There’s a larger question at work here, and that’s whether The Road can be a direct examination of goodness without being about Christianity. For me, what makes “Christian” an applicable adjective in a literary context is not just an emphasis on virtue or manichaean good and evil characters; to call something Christian, I think it should partake of the more particular elements of Christian semiotics and philosophy.
The quote from Matthew is instructive for explaining myself, here. I think “great is your reward in heaven” should be taken literally; Christians believe in a located afterlife commonly called Heaven. I don’t think there’s a Heaven in The Road. The kid talks to his father’s spirit, but the kid has also become the POV character at that point. I think he’s an unreliable narrator. I think he talks to his father’s spirit from his perspective, but to the reader the father is dead and that’s it. There is nothing in the text that suggests to me a Heaven exists in the world of this novel. For this and a lot of other reasons, I think it’s a book about goodness, but not about Christian goodness.
Rich, I’m not talking about the life of the novel-as-object continuing after we stop reading it; obviously, The Brother’s Karamazov keeps existing in our world different translations and weird contemporary adaptations and the vague recollections of college sophomores and whatnot. But the world _of_ The Brother’s Karamazov is bounded by the “Starting out on the biography of my hero, Alexei…” on one end and “…the boys joined in his exclamation” on the other. (Hope I didn’t ruin it for anybody.) The world created within a novel is necessarily finite, is what I’m saying. Any subsequent revision or sequel is a slightly different world, is it not?
Also, fanfic? You mean literary criticism, right?
In regards to diction, it seems as if Cormac McCarthy emphasizes the details regarding the horrors that the father and boy sees. Is that to illicit feelings of horror from the reader because of the depth of destruction? or what is McCarthy’s intended effect with his diction?
I wouldn’t reduce it down to one intended effect, V — with respect to his diction, McCarthy isn’t that different here from his writing in other novels, all of which attempt to capture the various emotions and experiences of drifters, searchers, and hunted men moving haphazardly through some version of the American West.
No, I actually meant fanfic. You referred to “the world of a novel”; it’s entirely possible for someone to write, say, an action-adventure scene in which Dmitri escapes from Siberia, occuring after the events of TBK but within its “world”. Or, less comically, TBK was originally a serial, after all, so more got added to its “world” periodically; it’s not wholly impossible that some additional material written by Dostoevsky but cut by the magazine editor could be discovered. And Dostoevsky intended TBK to be the first part in a larger story, but died before he got to write it.
I don’t think that you can say that the world of a novel is bounded by a quote from its first and last sentences, even if you disallow later more-or-less canonical additions. What’s between those sentences sometimes changes over time. You could say that every slight revision thereafter is a slightly different world, but I don’t think that this conforms to what people generally think of as “the worlds of novels” — if you really thought so, you couldn’t refer to “the world of TBK”, you’d have to refer to a specific version of the text.
I think that people generally have a sense that there is an underlying world of a novel that persists despite minor changes. And fanfic is probably a better place to look than literary criticism for descriptive rather than prescriptive glimpses about how people generally think about it.
I can’t help but feel that if it was alluding to the Illiad or the Odyssey then you wouldn’t have a problem. You don’t like Christianity so you don’t like this book. Thats all fine and dandy, but does someone put down James Joyce and say “i might as well have read the Odyssey”. Or Dante’s Inferno and “i should have just read the Gospels”. Sure, in your face these things can be annoying, like bad Christian rock, but I see no reason why intrinsically they should cause a novel to be flawed.
aptninja,
Terrific comment. Thanks for clarifying what you mean; I can see how a reading that bulldozes Chaucer would be relevant to a discussion about whether or not The Road is Christian.
What good ever comes from their sharing?
This is the heart of the matter. If another possibility here is the world of existentialism, then is The Road on par with The Plague, or isn’t it? The two novels clearly share a despairing sense of a moral vacuum, while valorizing those individuals whose actions, as it were, “produce” morality.
In order to read the novel as a work of existentialism, you have to assume that the father is a more reliable narrator than the son, and that the father’s beliefs are more attuned to reality. That view is challenged by the whole structure of the novel, and by the structure of the confrontations between father and son within the novel.
The father continually underestimates the son. The father believes that the son can’t stand too much reality, when in fact the son is already plagued by horrific and prophetic dreams. The son dreams of his father’s death long before it happens. The son also frequently gets the last word in the arguments with his father, and convinces his father to be generous, though not as generous as the son would like. Since we know that the son already understands the destroyed world pretty well, his impulses do not come from ignorance.
There is, naturally, a great difference between the father and the son: the father needs a son, the son needs a world. Even if the father had escaped being mortally wounded, the son would probably have outlived him, which is why that bond is not enough. So the father owes it to the son to be generous to strangers.
Ultimately, if you want to believe that the pathos of the novel approximates to bleak nihilism, the novel’s ending is a big problem. If there’s nothing to be gained by sharing with strangers, then there’s no reason for the people in the commune to adopt the boy.
Part of the reason I didn’t love the novel was precisely the contrast between the scene with the band of cannibals, and the scene with the lone thief. The father and son hide from the band of cannibals, who are portrayed as animalistic decadents — McCarthy even dredges up the word “catamites” to describe their boy slaves. On the other hand, the son wants to show generosity to the lone thief. This is very bad ethical reasoning, the reasoning of the pogrom: show generosity to all human beings who are not inhuman.
The Brothers Karamazov certainly does not end with its final page. Alyosha is on his way to becoming the image of the Russian Christian hero; Dmitri will try to receive as little punishment as possible for the crime he didn’t commit. Only Ivan, who has gone mad, has really attained his final state by the last page.
You don’t like Christianity so you don’t like this book. Thats all fine and dandy
You’ve made an assumption here, and it’s a wrong assumption.
I don’t like being bored. For Christian/apocalyptic novels I loved, see The Grapes of Wrath, Gilead, and The Horseman on the Roof. Not to mention the film Children of Men.
Man, sometimes reading stuff like this makes me realize that there is an overabundance of crap I don’t know. I read this book in less time than it takes for most of my attempts at literature. I read the Blood Meridian before it, and that was truly like walking through quicksand–I didn’t want to move too fast or I would be in over my head.
But with The Road, it was so fast moving, I amazed myself with my reading speed. But I just think it was that good of a book.
You mentioned dinner with McCarthy being akward, and from what I have read of him, I agree. He has a conversation with the Cohen brothers in a new article on Time.com, talking about their new movie coming out next month.
Thanks for your thoughts.
I think the real question is wether the end is “real” or not. Does the boy get rescued by an unlikely good guy who comes out of nowhere at the last moment, or is his rescue wishful thinking or death wishing by an unreliable narrator?
Many critics have mentioned that it is very unlikely that a good guy would come out and save the boy at the end. They even state that McCarthy has “sold out” to commercial interests.
I disagree.
IMO, McCarthy has a pessimistic view of human nature, but this book was written for his child and as such the ending is his wish that goodness would triumph.
Also, what do you guys think of the boys glowing near the end of the book and of his allusions to something special by the dad.
Nelson,
There are a lot of details in the description of the rescue, particularly the oil used to lubricate the gun, that don’t make sense if the child is hallucinating.
It’s possible that the father is hallucinating, I guess, since he’s also the one who knows about trout, but in that case we have to presuppose a sudden and complete abandonment of the limited-omniscient narration. I don’t think that assumption is warranted.
Personally, I’m not inclined to make aesthetic exceptions if the novel is written under certain circumstances. Otherwise the whole thing starts to veer towards a defense of wishful thinking. Truly hopeful novels can be much more than that.
Apologies; I’ve returned the book to the library, and can’t check on the scene(s) you’re referencing here. Do others have thoughts on this?
I realize this thread has passed quite some time but I wanted to comment on your idea of what it means when the boy tells the father, “I am the one.”
I didn’t see it the way you did. To me, that was one of the most powerful lines in the book. The father had assumed he carried all the burden for the son and all the fears about the son dying and finding food.
The boy is letting the father know he is more worried than his father ever suspected. The boy is full of fear about his father’s health, his father’s death and what will happen. Early in the book the boy insists his father share some of the Coke. The boy is letting the father know that he’s far more afraid and uncertain than the father can ever know.
I think it’s an oversimplification to say this is a parable. I think he intends it for what it is: To show the depth of the cruelty and love humans are capable of.
I don’t really understand how exactly it is all about religion. If you read carefully what about the style of how he wrote it. The punctuation. Maybe since they way we live today is slowly diminishing in the book so is everything the human civilization learned or even created. The world is brought to nothing. Yes it is about a father and a son but it’s also a way to realize how humans today take the way they live for granted.
If this is to be interpreted as a Christian allegory, how does this contribute to the significance of the work as a whole? What is McCarthy’s point in doing this?
If McCarthy actually commented on the issue, which he probably never will, I would guess that he’d see the point as trying to re-invent Christian morality (by putting it in some new clothes) on behalf of a society that has ceased to recognize those values and is consequently in decline.
I’m so happy to read your review. I absolutely hated this novel, and don’t understand the hype. I’ve been scouring the internet trying to find someone who was willing to say that they dislike this book, and I finally found this post. Thanks for having good taste. :)
I’m not sure if it’s already been said here, but I’m quite sure The Road is atheistic. God is remarkable because he’s not there. Instead, McCarthy places God in humanity. I mean, Ely even says “There is no God and we are his prophets.”
God’s whole creation is turned to dust and ash and there is no morality except in the boy, or anything we would recognise as morality. He picks apart the idea that an objective God would have to exist for morality to exist, because He doesn’t and the only thing that matters is surviving, even if surviving is only ever succeeded by more surviving.
Everything is without a point or a purpose. McCarthy makes it clear that there is no God. He’s uses Biblical syntax ironically, as a chronicle of the end of the world, and he uses the ideas of Ely (the judge in a world where there is nothing to judge) and the cruelty and/or powerlessness of any God that may exist as an urging for man to become their own Gods.
I don’t think I can actually think of a novel I’ve read that’s seemed more atheistic to me.
OK, Ely says that. But what does he mean? He’s giving us McCarthy’s version of the old adage, “if God didn’t exist He would have to be invented.”
It seems like an atheistic statement, but it’s not. It’s not idealizing a pragmatic democracy of values, a la Richard Rorty, in which we create ethical laws within communities. Instead, it’s an earthly version of Pascal’s wager: since there’s nothing to be gained by not believing and not obeying, we should create a deity to whom we can subordinate ourselves.
Remember, dust and ash is not “godless.” God loves turning things into dust and ash. That’s what we turn into when the soul detaches from the body at the moment of death. That’s all that was left of Sodom and Gomorrah when He got angry.
Likewise, it may seem as though the “Catamites” prove that the world is anarchic, but they actually prove that the world has an extremely rigid moral structure. The Catamites are clearly evil from the beginning, and they are clearly nonbelievers. Because they have ceased to believe in God, they have become savages, regressing to the position that “everything is permitted.” A novel like The Plague, by Albert Camus, does have generous heroes, but the ungenerous people are just selfish. They aren’t festooning themselves with severed heads.
I have tended to favor your interpretation in this interesting thread, but I think you have a remarkably diluted understanding of theism of you think that line from Ely is theistic, or that a secular version of Pascal’s wager would be a defense of God’s existence.
The observation that gods (not only the Abrahamic God as everyone assumes these days) are necessary for political order is in itself neutral but as the primary defense of religion is obviously atheistic.
Btw although I don’t remember the catamites in TR I don’t Cormac McCarthy meant them to be the representatives of Godlessness. They are rather the victims of it. The slaves building the pyramid rather than the Pharaohs.
I do think CM was presenting a deliberately hazy sort of secular Christianity in TR, so I do agree with RA there there is no God present in the world of TR. There are no miracles, no burning bushes, no revelations. I might be overlooking some key points but if you agree with my previous sentence you have to agree there is no God. I guess it’s easy to forget these days how vigorous genuine theism is – see for example Muslim’s praying multiple times a day, making pilgrimages to Mecca, and generally expecting God to give them direction in every important aspect of their lives. If something like this is what the presence of God means, he is surely absence from TR.
(But contra aptninja, I think the godlessness of TR is not the godlessness of nihilism or existentialism, but rather some kind of secular Christianity, which is something we might well regard with suspicion.)
Bleh sorry for the awkward double post but I realized my fourth paragraph is misleading. I stated it as a syllogism but I only meant that CM does not intend us to find evidence of God in the world of TR (incidentally God is always the Christian God for him), or evidence that the belief in God is keeping anyone going.
The first point is against a literal Christian interpretation, the second point against the existentialist interpretation. The child is supposed to be in reality, not just in myth, a Christ-like figure. But what does it mean to be Christ-like with no Christ? This is the problem of a secular Christianity.
This book was a lot better than this article gave it credit for.