The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road by Cormac McCarthy takes the reader on a journey of profound horror. The setting is a post-apocalyptic United States of America. McCarthy imagines a world where every living thing has been destroyed, save for a few resilient humans. There is nothing to eat, no plants to harvest, no animals to hunt. Not even an insect to swat.

The nature of the apocalyptic event is never revealed. Was it environmental? An unstoppable virus? A nuclear firestorm? A meteor from the heavens? Did humans bring this catastrophe upon themselves? The reader doesn’t know and never does find out. This adds to the desolation, the hopeless dread that this story continuously invokes.

The novel tells the story of a father and son traveling down a desolate highway, heading west in an attempt to escape the winter weather that is inexorably coming. The two main characters remain unnamed throughout. Names are irrelevant, McCarthy seems to be saying, their struggle to remain alive is robbing them of their humanity.

Civilization has collapsed. Technology has vanished. Life has been reduced to a search for food. All that is left are the caches of canned and preserved goods that have survived the catastrophe, whatever it was. These supplies are dwindling. The supermarkets were trashed long ago, virtually every home and building emptied of edible material. Some of the remaining humans have banded together in desperation. And some of these gangs have resorted to eating the flesh of the only animal remaining on the planet.

The horrors mount. At one point, they fall upon a house with a room that’s locked and barred. What treasures are hidden inside? The man thinks it must be food. It has to be food. The boy is deathly afraid. The man breaks down the door with an axe, only to find a room full of emaciated people, chained amidst their own filth, kept like a small, precious herd of cattle.

Another time, they sense another presence and hide in the woods, watching a small troupe of men pass by, with a pregnant girl in tow. All other humans are potential dangers. Some days later, they happen by an old campfire, a tiny skull adrift in the ashes.

The father and son live (if you can call it that) in constant fear. They have only a small pistol to protect themselves, and a limited number of bullets. The boy is the man’s conscience, keeping him from descending into the depths that others have. Hope remains somehow, despite the utter absence of any semblance of a logical hope that mankind will survive. This hope is irrational, but still it remains.