The Road

Looking at ads for the movie based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel The Road, Ron and I had a discussion about what we consider a new type of post-apocalyptic fiction, a modern type that has moved away from science fiction and towards horror. The author of this new kind of post-apocalyptic novel is like the torturer on Firefly who says "only in extremity do we see the real you."

But the new post-apocalyptic novel is not about acute pain. It's about the after-effects of such pain. It's about endurance. And just as one long-term effect of chronic pain on a human being is grumpiness, one long-term effect of chronic fear is aggression. The unsettling--yes, even horrifying--thing about a novel like The Road is that readers begin to admire such aggression. We know that the guy who fires first is the one who gets to live.

McCarthy, in his characteristically ruthless way, takes that idea to an extreme to ask whether in a world where aggression is essential for survival, how much meaning is left in survival itself.

In the first hundred pages of The Road, the protagonists, a man and his son, have already pared their existence down to the bare minimum. They walk south because their world is cold and covered with ash from the cataclysm that occurred on the day of the boy's birth. "They used to play quoits in the road with four big steel washers they'd found in a hardware store but these were gone with everything else" in one of their panicked dashes away from the grocery cart in which they push extra canned food and blankets. The cart contained a yellow toy truck, but the boy no longer plays with it. The man wants the boy to have something besides walking south and eating sparely from their scavenged cans of food:
"He'd carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from out of the ashes of its ruin."

The man tells the boy "we're carrying the fire." What that means, in practical terms, is the subject of periodic debate. The boy wants to seek out a barking dog he hears and a little boy he thinks he's seen, but he settles for the man's promise that he won't kill them. The boy wants to give their food away to those few old men they meet who appear to be less fortunate, and the man agrees, at one point, although he makes sure the recipient of their charity knows that it comes from the boy, and not him. He and one old man have a conversation about what it means to be alive:
"Suppose you were the last one left? Suppose you did that to yourself?
Do you wish you would die?
No. But I might wish I had died. When you're alive you've always got that ahead of you.
Or you might wish you'd never been born.
Well. Beggars cant be choosers.
You think that would be asking too much."
When the man brings up God, the old man tells him "there is no God."

And yet later, when he's alone with the sleeping boy, the man reverts to his belief in a God or gods. He has to believe that his survival has meaning in order to go on:
"I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back."

The novel ends when the man can no longer physically go on, and with the promise that the boy's life will continue. But there are things that cannot "be made right again," things in his memory that will remain there. The author has walked this fictional boy down the road of torment to see what could be most "real" about such a person, and my conclusion is that if the boy hardens himself to the suffering of others, he will become like his forbears who destroyed the world. It is his weaknesses, those impulses which could jeopardize his survival, that remain the essence of his humanity.

The Road is a movie I know I don't want to see; I don't want to see the aggression and the blood. The horror. Older post-apocalyptic fiction focused on how terrible the idea of the end of the world is, what might have caused it, and sometimes how to start again. This newer kind focuses on the horrific details of surviving the end of the world, what we face if we just can't quit, if our aggression continues to escalate until that's all we are.