The Road

The Road (2007) is a dark and harrowing novel by Cormac McCarthy about a father and son's struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic America. After the collapse of civilization, the surviving humans are forced to commit brutal and horrendous acts to live. Against this barbaric background, McCarthy uses the father and son's story to explore themes of love and faith. The book netted McCarthy the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 2007 and was adapted into a successful film in 2009. Keep reading for a summary of the Road, analysis, and more.

Fig. 1 - Cormac McCarthy was inspired by his own experiences as a parent when writing The Road.

The Road: Summary

The Road starts in America in the near future. An unspecified disaster has ravaged the human population. The landscape is barren and ash-covered. Crops have ceased to grow, and few animals survive; without food or hope, society has completely collapsed. The remaining humans have formed roaming gangs that kill, enslave, or eat other people.

In this hellish landscape, the novel's two lead protagonists are an unnamed father and son who walk across the desolate highways hoping to reach the coast. They carry all of their possessions in a shopping cart and constantly face starvation and the threat of other people. The man is malnourished and suffering from a persistent cough but is driven by the need to ensure his son's survival. At night he is haunted by nightmares of a dead-eyed creature stalking them.

The man explains to his son that the world is full of bad guys, and they may be the only good guys left. Within them, they carry the fire of goodness, and so their survival represents a light in this dark, grey world. The man carries a gun with only two bullets. He has instructed his son that it is better to commit suicide than face capture.

While traveling southwards, they encounter a band of cannibals. One of them seizes the boy and holds a knife to his throat. The father is forced to kill the man using one of his bullets. The sound of the shot causes the father and son to abandon their possessions before the other cannibals arrive on the scene.

They journey without food and face starvation before finding a large plantation-style house. While searching the property for food, they discover a basement full of naked and starved people, some of whom are missing limbs. They are being kept alive as a food source for cannibals. The pair flee just as the cannibals come back to the house.

When they discover a backyard survivalist bunker, the boy is reluctant to enter, but they find a fully stocked pantry with the father's reassurance. They stay for a few days, eating well but soon refill a cart and move on. They encounter a lonely old man on the road, although the father is suspicious, the boy insists they share some of their food with him. The old man stays at their camp for one night, where he discusses the existence of God with the father. The father makes it clear that if God exists, he has abandoned the world and states that the only thing he believes in is his son.

Fig. 2 - The father and son traverse a grey and empty landscape looking for hope.

Through dreams and recollections, it is revealed that the man's wife has opted to commit suicide rather than face the struggle to survive. The man and boy continue their journey and witness the remains of an infant baby on a spit roast and evade another band of cannibals.

As the man's health deteriorates, they finally reach the coast but are disappointed to find the same grey, barren landscape as the rest of the country. After they scavenge an abandoned boat, the father retrieves a flare gun, which he fires off in a frustrated attempt to get God's attention.

The son falls into a fever, and the man refuses to leave his side. When the boy has recovered, they discover their cart has been stolen. After tracking down the thief, the father forces him to strip and then orders him to start walking. Knowing that this punishment spells certain death for the thief, the boy becomes upset with his father and argues that they can not be the good guys if they purposely cause another person's death.

Moving through a beach town, the father is shot in the leg with an arrow but is able to kill the attacker with the flare gun. Badly injured, the father's health continues to decline, and he is soon forced to acknowledge that he will soon die, leaving the boy alone. He considers killing his son to spare him from the danger of the world but realizes that his son must go on and continue to carry the light. The son refuses to leave his body for three days until a man with a shotgun approaches him. He wraps the boy in a blanket and introduces him to his wife, son, and daughter. The man convinces the boy that he is one of the good guys and takes him into his family.

The Road: Characters

The Road focuses on the journey of two unnamed protagonists, a father, and his son, as they encounter a cast of minor characters.

The Father

Little is shown of the father's life before the apocalypse. Flashbacks suggest that his wife, the boy's mother, has committed suicide rather than face what the world has become. The father is driven by his love and adoration for his son and is often making sacrifices to ensure his son's survival. In the beginning, he sees his quest to protect the boy as a role appointed by God. He considers the boy to be the embodiment of all that is good and right in humanity.

As the journey continues, the father's faith is tested, and he comes to believe that God has abandoned humanity. This belief in goodness and humanity is often tested by his encounters with other people who always represent a threat to his son.

The Boy

The boy has grown up in the post-apocalyptic world and has no memories of the world before. Even in this post-apocalyptic world, the boy remains hopeful about other people. He experiences the full horrors of the world, witnessing acts of cannibalism and murder, but remains optimistic and open to other people. The boy worries about the well-being of several individuals they meet along the road, offering to share their little food with them, and often disagrees with his father's weariness of others.

Like his father, he is driven by the idea that they must remain the good guys in a world full of bad guys. When his father kills one of the cannibals and forces the thief to strip, the boy wonders if these actions mean they are becoming like the bad guys they oppose.

The Road: Themes

Cormac McCarthy uses the bleak setting in The Road to explore universal themes of family relationships, love, morality, and faith.

Family and Love

McCarthy shows the father as driven solely by his love for his son. This love has become an almost sacred duty to the father as he is willing to risk his own life and kill others to ensure his son's survival. As well as surviving, the father believes it is important to pass down lessons to his son. The father imparts moral lessons about decency and goodness using the symbol of the flame to represent their struggle for survival as a quest to keep humanity alive. He also teaches the boy practical survival skills about scavenging and sourcing resources in the wasteland. Finally, the father has taught his son how to kill himself using the gun if they ever face capture.

While the boy's mother saw suicide as a way to spare her son from the horrors of rape and cannibalism, the father believes it is his duty to protect his family and continue their journey. In his eyes, suicide is only permissible if they run out of options. This love and dedication to his son is the father's only drive and although it is never vocalized, the father often shows his love through small acts, like sacrificing his food rations or giving his son a can of Coca-Cola.

Morality and Faith

With the collapse of society, morality seems to have disappeared as people are forced to commit brutal acts to survive. In this cruel world, the father attempts to raise his son with a moral code. He often reminds his son that they are the good guys carrying the fire, or light, of humanity through a dark world. Much like a fire struggling on a damp night, their journey often seems pointless.

The father's moral code often clashes with the harsh reality of life. While the boy struggles to understand the need for violence or mistrust, the father attempts to teach him that other people are a danger to their survival. His belief in the boy and protecting him at all costs becomes an almost religious belief to the father. This father counters with the man's anger and disappointment in God.

While talking to the old man, the father reports that he does not know what his son believes. However, McCarthy shows the boy's conviction as general faith in humanity. He continually tries to help other people by giving them food and shelter. Even in this violent world, McCarthy uses the boy to embody the light and faith in humanity.

The Road: Analysis

Cormac McCarthy was inspired to write The Road in a motel in El Paso, Texas. As his infant son slept, McCarthy looked out over the desolate town and wondered what it would look like in 100 years. He thought about his son and the future of the world and envisioned two characters who had nothing else in the world but each other. McCarthy originally envisioned this brief sketch as being a character background, worthy of only a few pages in another idea he was working on at the time. However, during a trip to Ireland several years later, he realized the idea was a book of its own.

Fig. 4 - Despite the danger and the struggles, the father and son must keep going.

In The Road, McCarthy drew from his own experiences to describe the fear and uncertainty parents experience when sending their children into the world. By leaving both lead characters unnamed, readers are able to imagine themselves as protagonists in this dark tale, which makes the novel more emotionally impactful. McCarthy dedicated the book to his young son, John Francis McCarthy.

Throughout the novel, McCarthy used symbolism to illustrate underlying ideas and concepts. The road on which the father and son travel and the struggles they face represent man's drive to survive and ability to overcome challenges. While the pair face danger on their journey, they continue to move forward. While the father rarely speaks about the society that existed before his son's birth, McCarthy uses the can of Coca-Cola to hint at the consumerist nature of this civilization.

One of the novel's most important metaphors is the father reminding his son that they are carrying the fire/flame through this dark world.

In this brutal world of murder and cannibalism, the pair stand against evil by continuing to be empathetic, carrying out small acts of carrying and refusing to hurt other people. The son was born just as the world went dark. To his father, the boy is the very embodiment of light and goodness in the world. While most of humanity has given up on trying to help people, the father and son fight to maintain a few embers of hope remaining in this dark world.

The Road is also an allegory or warning about the dangers of global warming.

The unidentified catastrophe leads to the death of most animals and the end of crops. Without these elements of nature, society collapses and man is forced to commit evil acts in order to survive. Others have pointed to McCarthy's use of religious imagery and themes as an endorsement of Christian beliefs.

The Road: Genres

Like many Cormac McCarthy novels, The Road is difficult to categorize in a standard genre. The Road is best classified as post-apocalyptic fiction and horror in terms of setting and plot. While some people view The Road as dystopian fiction, most dystopias deal with nightmarish societies of the future, whereas The Road deals with social disintegration.

While many novels in the horror genre explore supernatural themes and include monsters and ghosts, the horror in The Road comes from human beings. Without food or fundamental laws, all social contracts have disappeared. People are forced to do whatever they can to survive, including cannibalism and murder. As the father and son journey across the barren wasteland, they witness the true horrors of inhumanity, as ordinary people commit acts of cannibalism, slavery, and sexual assault.

The Road: Quotes

The Road is not broken into chapters, but McCarthy splits the narrative into sections.

The father and son witness one of the roaming gangs of cannibals as they move across the highway. McCarthy uses imagery and words that evoke a premodern scene: enslaved people, goods of war, and catamites to build a horrifying vision of the barbaric parade. This disturbing description provides a snapshot of how much civilization has degraded. Roaming gangs have conquered other people, seizing their resources ("goods of war"). They also have enslaved people to act as either food sources (pregnant women) or to confine them to sexual slavery ("catamites"). In The Road, McCarthy presents the true horror not as a supernatural being, but rather as other human beings.

The father and son navigate a world that has lost the vibrancy of nature and is slowly losing a sense of meaning. In this quote, McCarthy shows that the common bonds or agreed-upon rules of civilization are gone. While the father and son try desperately to cling to some sense of right and wrong, the world around them is focused only on survival.