Review of The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road has received a lot of attention and won the Pulitzer. While I enjoyed seeing what all the critical acclaim was about, it was also just a great, fast-paced read. As nice as it is to read a book with interesting techniques, the bottom line is that there is no substitute for a great storyline. In review, I have comments from several angles.

Comparative Literature Studies
The Road is reminiscent of Tolkien’s Ring trilogy in that it is the story of a journey (as Chantell remarked). I wish McCarthy would have included an illustration of the map that the man and boy follow like Tolkien did. It would help outline the story course and keep the many plot incidents from blending together.

Narrative Shift
Chantell mentioned the narrative transition in the novel. The book is told from a third person point of view. Though still in third person, the perspective shifts from the man to the boy at the end of the novel. The reason behind this is that the father dies and the boy now assumes the role of the main character. It reinforces that the responsibility of survival now rests with the boy himself.

Gender Studies
Rebecca mentioned that she read this novel as part of a Men’s Studies class, and I can see how it would be very fitting. If you’ve read the Border trilogy, you’ve noticed McCarthy has always focused on male characters, much like the tough guy writers of the thirties, i.e. Hemmingway et al. In The Road, we follow a father and son entirely. It’s a very close look at the masculine psyche and the paternal instinct to protect and survive.

You can’t look at the novel from a men’s studies angle without conversely analyzing it from a women’s studies perspective. First we must question the absence of female characters. Do we write this off as McCarthy’s preference as an author, or do we critically read this as a misogynistic text? When McCarthy does bring in the mother figure, it is hard to find anything positive in her portrayal. She essentially abandons the family, taking her own life. Is McCarthy casting her as a representation of women and an attempt to reverse the traditional stereotype of mother as selfless caregiver?

At the least, this complicates the male archetype because in having to be both father and mother to the boy, the man takes on typically female-oriented roles such as cooking, bathing, and nurturing the boy. Is it possible McCarthy is saying that in the future (the novel is post-Apocalyptic), role reversals will be a norm because of the instability of the familial unit?

Religious Implications
I can’t help but read the novel as an Abraham-Isaac allegory. The man repeatedly deifies the child, which we can parallel to Isaac as the promise child. The mother is a minimal character in both the biblical story and in this novel. And the father and the weight of his decision loom at the forefront in both scenarios. Throughout The Road, the man continually struggles with the thought of needing to kill his son to save him from torture by the villains who roam the wasted Earth, “He watched the boy sleeping. Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?” (29).

What about the man’s failure in the end to kill his son? After promising to never leave his son alone, he too abandons him like the mother. Are all humans (male and female) brought together in their failures?

Yet there is a family who adopts the boy. One criticism is that the ending could be read as McCarthy’s easy way of slapping together a quick, happy ending so we don’t leave the book utterly depressed. Yet I choose to believe it is an affirmation toward the communal ability to heal and a message that there is hope and redeeming qualities in others, even amid a world of evil.

Next on the Reading List: The Elephant Vanishes: Stories by Haruki Murakami